


Internal Affairs

by Safiyabat



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, Alternate Universe - Police, Extremely Dubious Consent, F/F, F/M, M/M, Past Castiel/Meg Masters, Past Sam Winchester/Crowley (dub-con)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-15
Updated: 2015-09-15
Packaged: 2018-04-20 22:50:33
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 31,807
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4805123
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Safiyabat/pseuds/Safiyabat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Meg's father, Captain A. Z. Azel, was taken down for corruption, her nemesis Crowley took over the major crimes unit and Meg herself was reassigned to Internal Affairs - the least respected department in San Francisco. The more things change the more they stay the same, though - Major Crimes becomes the target of competing investigations, both by the Feds (as represented by the Winchester Brothers) and a stunningly gorgeous state prosecutor by the name of Abaddon. Can Meg convince these competing investigators to work together well enough to take down her arch-rival and take down a huge human trafficking ring?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Special thanks to my beta, SweetSamOfMine, and to my incredible artist, Dizimart.

To say that the commissioner’s visit to Meg’s office was unexpected would have been an understatement. You might as well say that the Brooklyn Bridge was large, or that an amp turned up to eleven was loud. No one came down to Internal Affairs unless they had to, and pretty much no one had to. Even the handful of investigators working down there did whatever they could to escape the dank basement quarters assigned to the department, up to and including reviews of parking meter revenue. 

Meg had audited parking meter revenue ten times in the past five years.

She held it together, though, when she saw Luc Milton’s tall form filling the doorway into her office. “Commissioner Milton! How can I help you today?” She rose to her feet and hoped that it wasn’t too ass-kissy; the commander hated sycophants, but she had to say something, right? Just looking up and saying, “What do you want, I’m surfing the Web for porn,” would be too casual and besides, this was Luc Milton. 

He offered her a thin, gentle smile. “Detective Masters. You’ve worked in Internal Affairs for what, five years now?”

“Yes, sir.” It had been four years, seven months and twenty-six days but Meg wasn’t counting. It wasn’t as though she was bitter or anything. 

“Since Crowley took over in Major Crimes.”

“Sir.” Literally anyone would have been a better choice than Crowley. She hadn’t been a fan of Lilith, but Crowley was just a disaster. The solve rate had gone down by fifty percent since he’d moved over from Vice, and that was without considering the disciplinary problems and community complaints. Meg couldn’t say anything about it, though. The one time she had her office door had been filled with unripe grapes.

Milton’s smile shifted slightly, took on the characteristics of a smirk as he produced a thick accordion file from somewhere. She hadn’t even seen him carry the thing in here, that was how badly her skills had deteriorated since getting banished to the basement. “It seems that Crowley’s record has attracted some attention.”

She took the file. Funny how much paper could weigh; the record required both hands to hold. “If it has you down here, sir, I’m guessing that he’s not getting an award from a group of concerned citizens.” She glanced quickly at the first page of the file and put it back. “There is… there’s a lot in here, sir.”

“Well, when the head of major crimes sparks not one but two outside investigations it tends to generate a lot of data,” her superior retorted. His voice didn’t change, didn’t grow harsh or anything like that, but he had to be angry about that. It was outsiders coming in and poking around the San Francisco police. The last time that had happened….

Well, the last time that had happened Meg’s father had been taken down. 

“Two outside investigations, sir?” She raised an eyebrow.

“The state has appointed a special prosecutor to investigate the officer-involved shooting death of those supposed human traffickers last month.” Milton snorted. Meg kept her composure, but she couldn’t help but agree with him. The chances that those guys were involved with human trafficking were about one in half a million. Ion had sworn up and down that his life had been in danger, that he’d seen these guys killing the trafficked victims, and Crowley had just accepted it. “And the Justice Department, in their infinite wisdom, has opened up a civil rights investigation into the major crimes unit as a whole.” He rolled his eyes on that one. 

“The Justice Department? What, the Justice Department is sending people here?” She couldn’t keep herself from looking up. “That – that’s absurd! We haven’t done our own investigation, the state hasn’t had their own chance to look into it –"

Milton held up a hand. “I’m aware. I’m sure that the feds walking all over everyone, jurisdictionally speaking, will do wonders for the state attorney’s disposition. I hear she’s all charm.” The corners of his mouth quirked up. They could have been a smile, perhaps. “And that, Detective Masters, is why you’re going to be masterminding the investigation.” 

She put the file down on her desk. “Me.”

“Well it’s not as though we can have two external investigators show up and not involve Internal Affairs.” He raised his eyebrows, hands still on the desk.

Her body went cold. She hadn’t been singled out; this wasn’t any kind of real job. This was for show. She wasn’t expected to make anything of this. “Of course, sir.”

“Detective Masters?”

“Sir?”

He caught her eye; held it. “This isn’t some joke. You know the history. You know the personalities. These outsiders – sometimes it’s an outside force that can get things done. Sometimes that outside force needs a little direction.” His blue eyes twinkled like the sun on an icicle. “You’re going to be the one keeping that powder keg contained until the right moment, Meg. Don’t blow it.” He straightened up. “The DoJ guys are already in town. The lady from the State will get here sometime tonight; your meeting is tomorrow. You’re meeting with them first thing tomorrow morning.” He offered her a polite, official grin. “Enjoy.” 

She sank back into her chair once her most senior superior left the room, legs suddenly too weak to hold her up. She’d always admired Commissioner Milton. He’d been a friend of her father, one of the few who had somehow managed to stay untainted by his downfall. When he’d come to San Francisco she’d hoped to somehow earn his respect, maybe get a ticket out of Internal Affairs. When he showed up in her office she thought maybe today was the day – but no. Instead she got a joke of a case, kicked to IA for no reason other than the fact that outsiders were looking at them and they couldn’t get away with ignoring the accusation. 

She picked up the file again. “Begin at the beginning,” she muttered. She could sit around and feel sorry for herself all day if she wanted to, but the fact remained that Milton had brought the case to her personally instead of to the head of Internal Affairs and letting him delegate. He’d chosen her, and he’d done so for a reason. People had been protesting police brutality and corruption all over the country lately and San Francisco had not escaped, but Meg had to admit that some of the local cases that drew the ire of the protestors had merit. Ion’s story certainly didn’t wash with members of the community who had something to say about police violence, nor did it seem to impress people who were affected most heavily by human trafficking.

She buried herself in the case files. Ion, who had transferred to Major Crimes from the Schools Unit about a year ago, had been chasing after two males of East Asian descent. The men had been dragging two much smaller women who, upon autopsy, had been discovered to be adolescent girls of Southeast Asian origin – these facts were not in dispute. Ion followed the men into an alley and, after an interlude that was not directly witnessed by anyone, shot them. The girls, too, were shot by guns that were found near the men.

Meg frowned at the reports. She started typing, searching for records in the coroner’s system. The autopsy reports had to have just been made in error, right? They wouldn’t have just failed to swab two dead men, accused of having killed two teenaged girls and taking aim at a cop, for gunshot residue? Apparently they would have failed to do exactly that, and failed to do it twice because there was no record of the decedents having been swabbed at all. No one swabbed at the scene – understandable, she supposed – and not only had no one swabbed them at the medical examiner’s office but the crime scene technicians hadn’t even bagged their hands. Ion’s word had been enough. He’d claimed that they’d shot the girls, so they’d shot the girls.

Meg didn’t know Ion. He’d been in the Schools Department, for crying out loud, and anyone who thought about putting Meg near a school needed to take a good long look at their life and their choices. But she knew that years of breaking up fights and looking at the metal detector probably wasn’t cause for a whole lot of faith in Ion’s judgment when it came to knowing who’d shot the girls. Who was to say that he was even on the scene yet? The coroner put the time of death for the girls and the men at roughly the same time, and time of death was kind of an inexact science. He was probably a good enough guy, with plenty of good intentions, but her job wasn’t to consider good intentions. Had Ion even been on the scene yet when the girls were killed? How could he possibly know who was there?

She frowned and picked up her phone. Internal Affairs wasn’t well regarded but she did have some friends in the department, even after all this time. She dialed a number and let herself grin when she heard the familiar gravelly voice respond. “Schools. Lt. Castiel Speaking.” 

“Clarence,” she purred, twirling a dark lock of hair around her finger. She could just imagine him squirming with discomfort. “It’s Meg Masters. How are you?”

“Detective Masters. Hello.” He dropped his voice, and she could tell he was cupping his hand around the mouthpiece for increased privacy as though he wasn’t in an office of his own. “I thought we agreed to keep things professional at work, Meg.”

“I’m always professional, Clarence,” she grinned. “And believe it or not, I’m actually calling about work.” 

“Oh. Oh,” he repeated, as he remembered why she was hidden away in the basement. “How can I help your department today?”

_Can’t even say the name, can you?_ The thought was spiteful, and she didn’t care. “You worked with Joshua Ion before his promotion, didn’t you?”

He cleared his throat. “I did,” Clarence admitted. “It’s a shame about that shooting. I’m sure that it must be eating him up inside.” 

“So you’d describe him as scrupulous? Not the type to take a life unless he absolutely had to.” She made some notes on paper, so he wouldn’t hear her typing.

The taller cop paused. Once upon a time he’d been a detective himself, but when he’d been offered the opportunity to get off the streets and take a more administrative position he’d jumped at the chance. While he was a good tactician and great in a fight, he’d decided he just couldn’t handle the stress. He wanted nine-to-five, hobbies. He kept bees, for crying out loud. “He’s a good cop, Meg.” 

“I’m sure he is. I’m positive that he is.” She let out a little chuckle, not bothering to hide the bitterness. “Believe me, if anyone thought that he was anything but a good cop I wouldn’t be on the phone, I’d be in your office recording this. It’s just with all the protests and everything, all the attention that all police departments are getting – not just ours – we kind of need to be able to dot our t’s and cross our I’s and be able to show due diligence. Trust me. I’m not worried.” 

He stayed quiet for a moment, and then she could almost hear him relax. “He was a good cop. He had a good rapport with the kids in the three schools to which he was assigned. His service record will show that there weren’t any disciplinary problems but that only tells half the story. Crime rates in those schools halved. Drug arrests of kids in those schools, outside of school hours, decreased dramatically and his testimony as to the character of those children helped to get reduced sentences for those kids. He cared about them. They cared about him. The students in his last school threw him a party when they heard about his last promotion.”

Meg scribbled as fast as she could. “That was nice of them; I bet that made him feel good.” 

“I was surprised when he decided to go for the detective position,” Clarence confided. “Not that School Resource Officer is an easy position.”

“Hester Holmes was stabbed by a student at her assignment just a few days ago, wasn’t she?” Meg recalled, reaching out for her coffee. It was cold now, but it still had caffeine. 

He didn’t hesitate, not even a little bit, when he replied this time. “She got between two students who were fighting. It’s one of the risks of the job, and we know it when we take on the role. Fortunately it was a glancing blow; she should be back in the corridors in a week or two.” 

So he was hiding something, something about Ion. There were ways to get that information out of him, but somehow the thought of seducing him now just made her skin crawl. She knew that he thought of her as dirty, tainted by her father’s crimes. Good enough to mess around with, but not someone he could really be seen with at the office. “Right. Well, that’s a relief. I’m glad it wasn’t more serious. But you didn’t think Ion had any real interest in getting into detective work?”

“No, I didn’t. But he seems to have an aptitude for the work. Crowley tells me that he’s been instrumental in bringing a number of cases to a close since his start.” He cleared his throat again. 

“Do you have a cold, Clarence? Are you coming down with something?”

“No. I am perfectly healthy.” He coughed, a dry, forced sound. “I am as healthy as a horse. I’ve never understood that phrase. Horses come down with all manner of diseases, and they develop abscesses in their noses –“

“Got it. Thank you, Clarence. I’ll make a note of it in the file. Thanks for your time.” 

“It was good to hear your voice, Meg.” 

She let herself smile, ever so slightly, for what she once thought might have been. “It was nice talking to you, too. We’ll have to meet up sometime. Soon.” She hung up before he could ask what she meant by that. 

So. Clarence hadn’t copped to anything with Ion, but he’d dropped a fairly strong hint about the kid’s sudden trajectory change. Crowley had gotten involved personally. Since when did Crowley get involved personally in moving someone from policing middle- and high-school kids to investigating serious crimes in a major city? 

Her father would never have stood for it. 

Not for the first time, she wished she could just call her father and ask him about this. Sure he’d been dirty. He’d been more than dirty – he’d done terrible, awful things. He’d also been the absolute best at playing these kinds of games, and after all if you wanted to catch a crooked cop, who better to use than a crooked cop?

Was that why Milton had dropped this case in her lap? Did he think she was dirty too?

The question was, what would a guy like Crowley – who made Captain A. Z. Azel look like a jovial patrolman who occasionally took a donated stick of gum from neighborhood children - want with a school resource officer like Ion? 

She probably wasn’t going to find the answers tonight, and the idea of finding any justification for a civil rights investigation in one night was just laughable. She made a few attempts to take a look at the Major Crimes unit’s recent caseload, but couldn’t see anything glaringly obvious. They seemed to have an unusual fixation on human trafficking but that didn’t seem all that unreasonable to her. Human trafficking was filthy business; it was worth fixating on.

She deeply suspected that anything she found would be connected to the human trafficking issue that had culminated in a rookie detective shooting two men in an alley, and left two teenagers dead besides. Still, she needed to stay objective about this. She had a personal axe to grind against Crowley. That didn’t mean that she couldn’t do her job, get to the bottom of whatever was going on and try to keep the Department’s image at least on this side of respectable. 

She brought the file home with her and read it long into the night, both because it made for fascinating reading and because with Milton’s commentary about the State investigator’s disposition ringing in her ears she wanted to be as well-informed about the case as she could possibly be. Only when she realized that showing up looking like she didn’t get the memo about goth makeup not being proper workplace attire did she realize that getting a decent night’s sleep would be equally in her best interests and retire. 

She made it to headquarters bright and early the next morning, early enough to be the first one to get to the conference room. Nancy, the civilian admin who handled the bookings, had a big smile for her as she brought a box of doughnuts into the space. “Wow,” she gushed. “It’s not often that I get to see you outside of your department, Meg. You look good!”

“Thanks, Nancy. So do you! It’s nice to see you, too. Have they been treating you well up here?” She put her things down at the head of the table – making it obvious, just in case – and went to help the smaller woman with the coffee urns. 

“Well, the work isn’t quite as, uh, exciting as it was in Major Crimes but I can’t say that it’s not a little bit calmer. Lilith didn’t care for me much.” She lowered her voice as they entered into the more private space. “And Crowley doesn’t either.” 

“He sure shook things up when he took over, didn’t he?” Meg muttered, at least as much to herself as to her companion. How many good people had been shooed out the door when Crowley had taken over?

“I guess most people would, when they’re coming into a new job like that, right?” Nancy bit her lip and looked up, wide-eyed. “I mean, there was a lot of bad stuff happening around there, not just with your…”

“Yeah. I know, Nance.” She sighed. “Dad wasn’t a saint. Some other people saw it as license. I get it.” 

“I know. But you’re doing okay in Internal Affairs, and I’m doing much better where I am.” She smiled, gold cross at her neck catching the light just enough to glint. “I think your guests will be here soon.” 

She made herself grin. “I hope so. Otherwise there won’t be any doughnuts left for them!” 

Nancy left, and Meg sat down at the head of the table to watch the door and wait. After five minutes, she got up and poured herself a cup of coffee. 

The first “guests” to arrive showed up five minutes after she filled her mug, and she heard them before she saw them. “I’m telling you, Sammy,” came an aggressive male voice that cut through the ever-present din of elevators and telephones and people trying to find loved ones, “The Giants aren’t going to do squat this year. I don’t care if he is almost as tall as you are.”

Meg paused. Tall guys named Sam weren’t exactly rare, but they weren’t exactly a dime a dozen either. It was probably a coincidence, though. 

“Dean, it’s not about his height, it’s about his mechanics.” This voice was softer, quieter, and Meg froze. The voice was definitely older, but she knew him. She’d know that voice anywhere. It belonged, after all, to the person who was responsible for her father’s downfall. “And his mechanics are the best in the game. There’s no one else you’d want out there. There’s no one else you’d ever think of calling to pitch two days in a row, not a starting pitcher. And he pulled it off.” 

“Yeah, sure, last year,” the other voice – Dean – scoffed. Now the door opened. “Now watch, his arm’s going to fall right off. Hey, look. Doughnuts.” 

Dean proved to be a tall, solidly built man with short, dirty-blond hair. He was handsome enough, in a “Federal Agent Please Take Several Thousand Giant Steps Back” kind of way, and his smile was genuine when he reached out a hand to shake hers before he reached for the doughnuts so he at least hadn’t been raised in a barn. “Dean Winchester, Department of Justice. This is my brother, Sam.” Winchester. Of course, he’d have brought another Winchester with him. The bastards ran in packs, or maybe nests. Like roaches. 

She’d had enough time to compose herself and managed to twist her lips into a smirk. “Hiya, Sammy. Long time no see.” 

Was that guilt, somewhere up in the corners of his eyes? “Meg. It’s been a long time.” His lips relaxed into something like a smile. “You look great.” 

“Thanks.” She searched for something to say. “Did you get even taller?”

“Uh, yeah. I think I did.” One corner of his mouth twitched. He wasn’t lying, either. He had gotten taller, and his hair had gotten longer too. How he managed to have hair that long and work for any Federal law enforcement agency was beyond her, but hey – it was a different administration these days. The suit was a nice look on him, though, better than the polyester uniforms they had him in back in the day. 

“You two know each other?” Dean blinked, looking from Meg to Sam and back again. “What, is she an old girlfriend or something?”

Sam sighed. “No, Dean. Nothing like that.”

“Me and Sammy go way back,” Meg pointed out, sipping from her coffee. “Don’t we, little brother?”

And wasn’t that a funny thing? Sam closed his eyes in the most exhausted, despairing expression she’d ever seen on him. Dean’s face moved from confusion to comprehension to red-faced rage in the span of about three seconds. “Wait – is she –"

“Meet Meg Masters,” Sam sighed. “We have the same biological father. So yeah. Meg, this is Dean. Same mother.” He stalked over to the coffee urn and poured himself a coffee. 

“Did you set this up?” Dean demanded, wheeling on his brother and pointing. “Did you make this happen? Trying to connect with them again? Is that it?”

Meg stared at them, unable to keep her jaw from hanging open. This wasn’t what she’d expected from the family that had fought so hard to keep little Sammy from them. “No, Dean. I didn’t even know about the case until we were assigned last week.”

“And I wasn’t assigned to the case until yesterday, so there wasn’t some kind of conspiracy,” Meg added, watching the brothers carefully. “I’m pretty sure we had a mutual desire to never see each other again the last time we saw each other. And that was okay.”

“I’m sure we can all be professional about this,” Sam insisted, sitting down. He took a seat beside Meg, sitting on the edge of his chair but pulling out his laptop nevertheless. “We’re all here to do a job.”

Dean glowered, both at Meg and at Sam, but he sat down beside his brother. “This ain’t over,” he muttered to the latter. 

“When is it ever?” Sam shot back, equally quiet.

Meg sat back and contemplated. She’d figured that Sam would be the golden child in the Winchester family once he helped to put Dad in San Quentin, but apparently that wasn’t the case. She wasn’t quite ready to let go of all of her bitterness, or even much of it, but it was an interesting dynamic to note. “So,” she commented. “You’re with the Justice Department now. I guess San Fran PD was just a stepping stone for you.”

“I did have a goal in mind,” Sam admitted, looking her in the eye. “But I was always going to be a lawyer. You knew that, though. Once I finished my degree I joined a firm and did some private practice for a little while. That’s when the Office recruited me.” He glanced at Dean. “Dean came in through the military.” 

“And now they spend their days wandering around the country minding everyone else’s jurisdiction for them.” The door, which had been left open, now filled with the shape of a tall, strikingly beautiful woman. Her suit had been impeccably put together, so perfectly that even a big-screen hit from the Forties couldn’t have done it justice. Her make-up was flawless, to the point that Meg suspected it had been tattooed on, and there wasn’t a single red hair out of place in that perfect coiffure. It was probably afraid to move. 

The woman strode in, heels beating out a staccato rhythm on the faux marble floor, but neither of the men seemed intimidated. “I prefer to think of it as looking out for the rights of people whose rights have been ignored or worse for a very long time,” Sam told her, rising to his feet with a polite little smile. He extended his hand. “Sam Winchester, Civil Rights Division. We’re not so much looking to intervene in anyone else’s jurisdiction as to…”

“Investigate,” Dean supplied.

“Right,” Sam added. “Supply a fresh set of eyes. Sometimes it can be easier to solve a problem when someone who isn’t immersed in the culture is looking at it.” 

The woman – easily the most beautiful woman Meg had ever seen in her life – took Sam’s hand, but her expression didn’t change. “Abaddon Sands, Special Prosecutor for the State of California.” 

Sam glanced over at Meg, just once. “Let me introduce Detective Meg Masters, from Internal Affairs. We’ve only just arrived but I’m guessing that Detective Masters was assigned to the case because of her extensive familiarity with the inner workings of the Major Crimes unit.” Dean cleared his throat, loudly. “Also this is Special Agent Dean Winchester, from the Department of Justice.”

“Howdy,” Dean waved. 

Meg met the prosecutor’s eyes as she transferred her hand from Sam’s to Meg’s. “Pleased to meet you,” Meg greeted. “Honestly, this is probably an unpopular opinion around here but I think it will be good to have an impartial third party to take a look at the evidence and decide if there’s a reason to pursue disciplinary charges against Joshua Ion or something more.” _Oh, you want her to pursue something more all right_ , her brain mocked her. She shushed that part of her brain. It wasn’t even ten o’clock in the morning yet, far too early to be thinking about those lush, red lips against hers.

Abaddon turned to Sam and Dean, still holding Meg’s hand but much less welcoming when looking at the boys. “What exactly do you think that the case of Detective Ion has to do with civil rights violations?”

Dean closed the door to the conference room. “Well,” he began, “community activists pointed out that all four of the deceased were of Asian descent.”

The lawyers and the cops settled themselves back around the table, with Sam and Abaddon facing off on either side of Meg. The brunette envied her half-brother yet again – he got to look directly at Abaddon. Of course, he spent the whole time looking at his laptop whereas she would probably have been drooling into her accordion file, so maybe it was for the best. “That’s not exactly unexpected,” Meg pointed out. “I mean, a good portion of the human trafficking business in this area is kind of… focused in a certain community.” She winced.

Sam looked up and rocked his head gently from side to side. “Valid. The two men killed by Ion, though, had no history of ties to human trafficking.”

Dean glanced at him. “Maybe they were just smart enough to not get caught.”

“Or maybe they were part of an organization devoted to ending human trafficking.” Sam turned his screen around, revealing a web page with a bio of a man by the name of William Liu. William was described as a “tireless worker to end the exploitation of women in San Francisco,” a “lifelong resident of the city” who had “always put his community first.”

The face at the top of the page matched one of the men that had been killed.

“I’m not saying that this means that the guy couldn’t have been caught up in human trafficking,” Sam continued. “I’m just saying that it warrants further investigation.”

“As an internal affairs issue,” Abaddon told them, leaning forward. “Or as an issue for the state. Not as a federal problem.”

Sam cleared his throat. “So… community leaders provided evidence of a number of occasions when detectives from the Major Crimes unit displayed a complete disregard for their identities, a lack of respect for them as Americans or as human beings and specifically singled them out for questioning or harassment because of their ethnic background. At the very best, we think this may have played a role in Detective Ion’s actions when he killed Mr. Liu and Mr. Cho. At the worst, there may be something more systematic at play here. I hope not,” Sam continued, holding up his hands. “I remember the Department as having been pretty diverse when I was here, so I hope that we find that any problem is relatively minor.”

Dean’s smile was nasty, condescending. “Send everyone for diversity training, maybe have some milk and cookies.”

“All that we’re here to do right now – all that we came here with the intention to do,” Sam corrected, “is investigate. We have a mission of our own, it’s true, but it isn’t incompatible with a mission to investigate the shooting death of two suspects or any other matter that may come up that interests Internal Affairs.” He met Meg’s eyes squarely. “We have resources that we are more than happy to bring to bear for you if you need them. All that we ask is that you do the same for us. Equal sharing of information. Does that sound fair?”

Abaddon frowned. “How do we know that we can trust you?” she demanded. “It would hardly be the first time that the feds got in the way of an investigation, or pulled out when they decided that a matter was ‘beneath them.’”

“Yeah, Sam,” Meg sniffed. “Can you prove you’re not going to dine and dash?” Abaddon threw her a glance, but Meg kept her eyes on Sam for this.

“What, you mean show you a secret document saying that the President himself signed an executive order saying to take down the Major Crimes unit by any means necessary?” Dean huffed out a laugh. “No. Because we don’t have that. But what I can do is give you the promise that we all want the exact same thing: the truth, no matter what it is. Meg, you’ve already seen that Sammy’ll do whatever it takes to get that truth.” 

And that was true, she had. She didn’t like to admit it but she’d seen that drive in him first-hand. It wasn’t pretty. It had left a lot of shattered lives in its wake – hers, and his, included. But he’d done it, and if the deep sadness she saw in his face was any indication he’d probably done it again too. “Yeah,” she sighed. “You’ll do it.”

Dean grinned. “All righty then. Let’s kick this bad boy off.” He reached for a doughnut, sprinkling powdered sugar over the table. 


	2. Chapter 2

The investigators all agreed that rather than be obvious about their activities, at least at first, it was probably best if they met up nightly at one of their hotels instead of making themselves obvious at headquarters. They’d come to headquarters if they needed something, certainly, but they weren’t going to tie up the conference room and risk having their work stolen if they didn’t need to. Meg didn’t think she was imagining the look of relief on Sam’s face when both Dean and Abaddon agreed to Meg’s plan; he might not be the same fresh-faced young patrolman he’d been all those years ago but someone was sure to recognize him if he spent enough time here. They exchanged contact information and parted ways to start work. Meg had a good feeling about the team, or at least about most of the team, being on board and committed to doing what needed to be done.

She knew that it was just a matter of time before Crowley caught on to what was happening. After all, it was difficult to open up an Internal Affairs investigation into a guy without his unit head finding out eventually. She’d hoped that maybe she could get a few days’ worth of work on the case without his oily presence, but she was one of Captain Azel’s kids. Their luck never ran that way. She felt those dark eyes on her before she heard or saw him, standing in her office doorway as she powered down for the night. “Crowley,” she greeted without looking up from the screen. She’d managed to get a record of all of the human trafficking cases to come through San Francisco PD’s doors since Crowley took over in Major Crimes, long before Ion had joined the department, and this was too fascinating of a read to put it down for a slimy salesman of a cop with a bad accent. 

“Whore,” he greeted, tone just as warm.

“Sexual harassment is an actionable offense under chapter five, section six, paragraph two of the San Francisco Police Department employee handbook.” She let her eyes flick up from the screen to meet his squarely. She wasn’t afraid of him. “That includes unwelcome comments that reference sexuality.”

His lip curled. “Oh, please. We both know that no one has ever been disciplined for anything of the sort.” His footsteps echoed through the small room as he strode into the office. “I understand you’ve been looking into one of my boys, princess.”

She tabbed out of the screen she’d been on, but slowly. He couldn’t see what she’d been reading, but she let it be obvious that she wasn’t allowing him to see something. He hated that sort of thing. “Hmm, unarmed suspects, botched processing of the crime scene, hordes of screaming protestors – can’t imagine why that would spark an IAD investigation. I’m doing the job I was assigned, Crowley.”

“Hmm. Because I would hate for anyone to think that this was sour grapes or anything like that.” He picked up a file on her desk and flipped through it. “Fascinating. Detail officer napping on the job. You do pull the most exciting caseload down here, don’t you?” Interesting, she thought. Crowley had chosen to ignore the “unarmed” comment. Was that an admission of someone’s guilt? It wouldn’t stand up in court, but it did arouse her suspicions.

“Is there a reason you came down here, Crowley? I’d rather not have to get the linoleum steam-cleaned.” She wouldn’t glance at the time, wouldn’t grab her briefcase. She wouldn’t give him the satisfaction or excite his curiosity. 

“It’s just been such a long time since I’ve seen your shining face. I thought it would be nice for us to have a little chat. Ion did nothing wrong in shooting those miscreants, Azel. And you know it.”

“It’s Masters, thanks.” She’d changed her name when the truth came out about her father, largely at his suggestion. If she and her brother wanted to keep their badges and work anywhere, never mind in San Francisco, they’d have to change their names. Her brother, Tom, had refused. He’d stood by that name, even through everything that came out in their father’s trial. He’d died for it. “If Ion did nothing wrong, the evidence will corroborate his story and we’ll be able to close the investigation quickly. It would help things along if you would give me something more concrete than creeping along and saying, ‘He didn’t do anything wrong,’ that I could point to and use as proof.” She gave her very best sweet smile.

He took a step back. “Of course. You have your job to do.” He sniffed once and oozed out of the office. 

She waited a full ten minutes, texting Sam to let him know she’d had a visit and that she was running late. It felt odd to text him, of all people. She would rather text Abaddon, the beautiful lawyer. Abaddon hadn’t wormed her way into the family and then stabbed them all in the back, after all. And Abaddon was, well, breathtakingly beautiful. 

At the same time, Meg at least knew Sam. She might hate what he’d done to her, to her family, but she at least had some kind of relationship with him. She didn’t feel quite right texting either Abaddon, who was a complete stranger, or Dean, who was a complete stranger with a deep-seated grudge. She spent the time changing her passwords and shutting down, because a little low-grade paranoia never hurt anyone, and only after that ten minutes had passed did she get into her car and drive to the hotels.

Government employees typically did not stay at the highest of high-end hotels, and neither Abaddon nor the Winchesters were exceptions. Their hotels were next door to one another, chain establishments that targeted business travelers with promises of clean beds and bathrooms. They were meeting at the Winchesters’ place today, not that it mattered. All three were sat in the lobby, Abaddon glaring daggers at Dean and Dean throwing them right back at the redhead with Sam looking bored and miserable at the apex of the triangle. He brightened a little bit when he saw Meg, although she had to admit that it was marginal brightening. “Meg, hey,” he said with the tiniest of smiles. “You made it.”

“Yeah, well, sorry I’m late. I had a close encounter of the slimy variety.” Dean and Abaddon broke off their staring contest long enough to furrow their brows. The expression was much prettier on Abaddon. “Crowley,” she explained. “He stopped by to assure me that Ion did nothing wrong.”

“Is this normal?” the special prosecutor wanted to know. “I mean, is it typical for a department head to come and harass an internal affairs investigator in San Francisco?”

Meg gave a bitter snort, and Sam cleared his throat. “Internal Affairs isn’t… um, isn’t given a lot of respect or credence in the SFPD,” he explained, looking away. “In a lot of ways they’re seen as kind of adjunct to HR – they’ll get called if two officers are ‘fraternizing’ or something like that, or if someone’s suspected of doing something like going and shooting pool instead of writing parking tickets. Serious misconduct doesn’t tend to get a lot of attention…” He grimaced with a quick glance at Meg. 

“Unless it gets a lot of attention,” Dean finished. “Which is why we’re here.” He leaned back in his seat, legs relaxed, arms wide. 

Abaddon made a note of something on her legal pad, but quickly returned her eyes to Meg. “That’s a galling way to run a police department.” 

Meg shrugged, feeling her cheeks pinken a little. “Yeah, well. IAD is where they dump people they can’t justify getting rid of but don’t want around. As far as he’s aware, though, the investigation is just about Ion and that one specific incident, not the unit as a whole. So we’ve got that going for us.” 

The redhead smiled. God, even her teeth were perfect. “Thanks to you.” 

“Hopefully it will last,” Meg grinned.

Dean cleared his throat. “So. Anyone else feel like moving this over to a restaurant or something? I’m freaking starving, and if I don’t remind my little brother here to eat every so often he starts to look like one of those creepy Neil Gaiman sketches. I saw a place around the corner that looked good, and hey – we’re on the per diem so it’s all good.” He shrugged. 

Meg and Abaddon glanced at each other and shrugged. Meg didn’t mind heading out; the lobby wasn’t exactly set up for a meeting or a conversation, just as someplace to literally meet colleagues and go someplace else. 

The place that Dean had found turned out to be a jumped-up burger joint, one of those places that might as well have called itself “false nostalgia” and had done with it. Meg didn’t really mind so much, she liked a good burger now and then. She didn’t quite see the value in the pornographic moans that periodically erupted from Dean’s throat as he bit into his burger, unless point was the look of embarrassment that he got from Sam. Abaddon of course looked politely horrified, but tucked into her burger with delight.

Sam got a veggie burger. 

They pooled the products of their day. Meg had been focused on the facts of the Liu and Cho cases. The guns that had supposedly been found on the two suspects had already disappeared from the evidence locker. Once they’d been photographed and taken back to evidence, they’d spent all of a week in the evidence locker before being destroyed. One week before logs showed that they had been taken out and melted down. She shook her head as she reported that piece of information. The bodies of the uncontested victims, the two teens, had been cremated within days of their deaths. 

Ballistics evidence from the guns found with the suspects could not be tied to bullets found in the victims, because the bullets were never lodged in the victims. Crime scene techs never found the bullets. Entry and exit wounds were consistent with the type that could have been fired at close range from those types of guns but they were also consistent with the types of wounds that could have been fired from all sorts of other weapons. 

As for his part, Ion had worked on human trafficking cases exclusively since coming to Major Crimes. Sometimes a case took a long time to solve, Meg was no stranger to that, but his cases tended to wrap up quickly and he always got assigned to the same type of case: human trafficking, always sex trafficking, always sex trafficking involving the East or Southeast Asian community. That part, that was definitely odd. People didn’t only work one type of case, ever. Not under Dad and not under Lilith. You mixed it up, to keep your skills sharp and (ironically) to decrease the possibility of getting involved in dirty business yourself. 

“It’s not even like Ion speaks any relevant languages,” she pointed out. “I mean I think he speaks a little bit of Spanish. Most of the cases he’s been working with involve Chinese-American or Korean-American perps and Thai or Laotian vics.”

Abaddon scrunched up her nose. “Something’s definitely not right there. You said he came out of the School Resource Officer program, right?”

She nodded. “He got along well with the kids and he was effective. Arrests were down, even when kids were outside of school.” 

“Should they have been?” Sam spoke up, breaking his veggie burger in half. He hadn’t taken a bite yet. “I mean, Crowley came from Vice, right?”

Meg bit her lip. “That’s a good point. It’s worth looking into.” Damn it.

Abaddon, for her part, had made inquiries of the Liu and Cho families. She learned that Ion’s method of detective work left a great deal to be desired. According to Cho’s brother, Ion was notorious for seeking out places where Chinese-American men gathered. He would choose one and “keep an eye on” him for a while, usually someone who was between twenty-five and fifty. If the man did anything that Ion considered “shifty” – the word the brother insisted Ion used – he would stop him and search him, looking for “evidence.” Ion had searched both Cho and his brother multiple times in the past. The brother felt it was best to just suck it up and accept it – there was nothing he could really do about it, after all, and it would just make him look guilty if he resisted. Cho himself pushed back all the time, saying that they were Americans just like Ion and that the Chinese Exclusion Act had been repealed long ago. 

“Was there any documentation?” Meg asked, as Sam started making notes in his iPhone. “I mean, I know it’s not like he’s going to get a signed affidavit every time Ion hassles him, but were there any witnesses, or did he ever write anything down?”

Abaddon’s answering grin was feline in its delight – proud, slow. “As a matter of fact, yes. Mr. Cho turned the webcam on one day when Ion visited him at home about three months ago; his brother emailed me the file. There were a couple of other incidents as well and the brother is sending me copies as well. He’s talking to friends and other family members that he says have similar stories and complaints.” 

“Well, that’s something.” Dean’s eyes lit up. “We can totally work with that. Hey, Meg, was there any indication that he had an ethnic bias before he switched into Major Crimes?”

She shrugged. “Not that stood out. I mean, a lot of our public schools, the ones that he was assigned to, are majority students of color. So he wouldn’t have been able to gain the trust or respect of the students if he was a racist asshole, or if they could tell that he was a racist asshole. That doesn’t mean he wasn’t or isn’t.” 

Dean, in his travels, had been talking to the activist group that had Liu on its members page. They described Liu as an “absolute sweetheart of a guy, he wouldn’t ever hurt a person.” The woman he’d spoken to – “stunning, by the way” – was positive that he wouldn’t have been involved with trafficking of women. “He abhorred the sex trade, hated the traffickers. And, as it turns out, on more than one occasion he got involved with rescuing girls. You know, superhero vigilante type stuff. I’m not a big fan of civilians going out and doing this kind of thing but if the local PD is in on it I guess who else is going to?”

“And let me guess,” Meg sighed. “He was off doing exactly that the night he and Cho were killed.” 

“Ms. Wen didn’t say that,” Dean admitted. “She’s not going to tell a white guy in a suit that she had prior knowledge that a buddy was going off to do something best left to the cops, right? But she said that they did get a call about a couple of young girls being brought up from LA that day. So one plus one equals two and…”

“And in all likelihood Liu and Cho were civilians trying to do the right thing. Unfortunately the union rep is going to tear that apart, never mind defense lawyers if a grand jury even indicts.” Abaddon scowled and looked away. “I get why they were doing what they were doing, but the other side is going to claim that these guys got themselves killed.”

Sam’s face darkened. “We’ll just have to dig harder then,” he declared, and poked at a French fry on his plate with a fork. “So. I’ve been talking to some of the activist organizations today.” He ignored Dean’s snort. “A lot of them have some long-standing grievances against SFPD, and I heard an awful lot of the usual. A lot of people, though, had some interesting things to say about vice-related crimes that went through Major Crimes.” Apparently these protestors – although, having grown up as a cop’s daughter, spent a lifetime as a cop herself and being a cop’s sister, Meg had trouble taking protestors seriously – felt that the way the vice-related crimes were investigated by the SFPD was a joke. Prostitution was a dangerous profession no matter what, but if you were an Asian prostitute in San Francisco over the past five years? Literally no one would ever look into your case. They wouldn’t even make a pretense of it. One woman told Sam, through an eight-year-old grandson, that her daughter had been killed. A week after her death had been reported to the woman, she went to headquarters to ask about progress on her case. The detective she met with, a middle-aged man by the name of Donovan, told her that no report had ever been filed. 

She’d had to bring the boy down to the medical examiner’s office to be told that she’d already been cremated and the remains disposed of. 

Fortunately Sam had managed to get a copy of the paperwork that she’d gotten from the ME’s office, along with statements by others that were just like it. She could just see him sitting there and listening to the poor woman too, that sympathetic puppy-dog look on her face. “Did she try to give you lunch before you left, Sammy?” she tsked at him. 

“Uh, almond cookies, actually,” he admitted. “I couldn’t get away without them. She was a nice lady. It’s a shame about what happened to her daughter.” 

They took stock and agreed to continue gathering information before confronting Ion directly. After dessert – Dean insisted that he had some kind of minimum daily requirement of pie without which he would shrivel up into a mouse or something – they parted ways, intending to meet up again tomorrow. 

Abaddon caught her on the way out, after the Winchesters had left. “I’m concerned, Meg,” she stated, hand on Meg’s bicep. “The San Francisco Police has had its share of corruption issues in the past.”

Meg frowned. “That’s… kind of insensitive to bring up, but go on.” 

The prosecutor closed her beautiful blue eyes for a second and shook her head. “No. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to allude to that. I’m concerned for your safety, Meg. I came here intending to look into, and prosecute, one detective but what the feds just suggested is beyond all of that. I mean, if they’re only half right several someones in this department are very deep in something very nasty. Don’t trust anyone inside that place.”

She made herself relax. She shouldn’t have been so defensive. Not everyone had an axe to grind over her progenitors. “Thanks, Abaddon. I’ll be careful.”

“Do.” She paused for a moment. “Sam Winchester – he used to work for SFPD, didn’t he?”

Well, there went all of that calm. “Yeah. Turns out he was working an angle the whole time.”

“What was that?”

“Looking to get evidence to take my – to take Azel down.” She took a deep breath. “You don’t think it’s a conflict of interest for him to be working on this case?” One perfect eyebrow rose.

“No, I don’t.” She surprised even herself with her answer, and she knew it probably showed on her face. “He’s a crusader, and I don’t mean that in a creepy ‘let’s take Jerusalem from the people who’ve lived there for centuries’ kind of way. I mean, he has something that he believes in very strongly, and much as I hate to admit it he’s got his reasons for believing in it. He’s not going to jeopardize his cause by letting his own… anything get in the way.” 

“And what’s his cause?” Abaddon pursed her lips, glancing out toward the hotel where her federal counterparts were staying.

“Going after bad policing, abuse of authority. I shouldn’t be surprised that he’s in the Civil Rights division.” She let her mouth twitch up. “We’re not friends, or even friendly, but he’ll be good for this.” 

“Hm. Alright. If you say so. Good night, Meg. I’ll see you tomorrow.” 

Meg drove home, the feeling of that hand on her arm keeping her warm the whole way.

Over the next three or four days not much changed. Meg pretty much stuck to the angle she’d been working – looking into the shootings, the victims, the suspects and Ion. The way evidence had been handled had been appalling by any standards and if nothing else came of this whole mess she wanted to make sure that this never, ever happened again. As she came to find out, however, the way evidence had been handled in the Liu and Cho killings wasn’t all that unusual by the standards set over the past five years for killings related to human trafficking in San Francisco. 

By the third day she found she wasn’t getting anywhere with the medical examiner’s office. The pathologist in charge, a Dr. Cara Roberts, didn’t know Meg and wasn’t inclined to give out information to anyone who wasn’t involved with the case. Ordinarily she might have approved of that kind of probity but right now Meg was deeply suspicious about what was going on down there and she expressed her frustrations at dinner one night.

Dean smirked widely. “I’ll get what you need,” he offered.

Sam rolled his eyes. “I’m sure Dr. Roberts is way too professional to give up sensitive information just because you bat your eyelashes at her, Dean.” 

Abaddon narrowed her eyes at the brothers. “You wouldn’t seriously use sex to get information from a witness, would you?”

Dean pretended to be affronted. “Of course not!” He grinned. “Just attraction.” 

Abaddon shook her head. Meg and Sam exchanged glances. If they got through this investigation without Dean and Abaddon killing one another it would be a miracle.

And it would be a shame to lose Abaddon. Meg wasn’t quite sure what to make of the prosecutor from Sacramento. She was perfect – everything she should be. She was always perfectly professional, always crisp and never ruffled. She never did anything so crass as to curse or raise her voice, but she could carry a quiet menace with just a few short syllables that could back even the brash Dean Winchester down like a kitten squirted with a spray bottle. Apparently bad hair days just didn’t happen to her, and she didn’t get runs in her nylons or smear her makeup. 

She never flirted outright. In fact, Meg couldn’t tell for certain that Abaddon was interested in women. Her eyes never roamed around the department or the restaurants where they worked. The only hope that Meg even had was the fact that those beautiful, perfect eyes sometimes condescended to linger on her for just a little longer than could be justified by mere curiosity or conversation; sometimes her hand would brush against Meg for just a moment; she always chose a seat near Meg. 

Dean went to visit the medical examiner’s office and got exactly nowhere. Meg had known that he would. He did, however, make some progress by making some calls to the local FBI office and talking with a friend of his there. He learned that they’d been trying to do something about issues with human trafficking in San Francisco for years but had found that the local police had been such a hindrance that they could get nothing done. His buddy was more than willing to work with Dean under the table, sharing evidence and passing notes.

Crowley’s attentions became more pressing, if less obvious. Meg noticed that someone from Major Crimes was always on the edges of her perception, any time she was in or around headquarters. She found that they rarely came to her office, but she couldn’t leave that small room without it being noticed. Most of them weren’t even trying to be subtle. Some of them were faces that she only knew through personnel files, although some were people she’d worked with and once considered friends. That hurt. She’d expected better, for example, from Ruby.

She couldn’t let it distract her. Abaddon wanted to look farther into Ion’s history with the School Resource Unit, which meant that her current crush was going to be there, in the office, with her. Meeting with her ex or at least her former fling, she recognized dismally as she dutifully set up the meeting. Seeing her closet of an office. Seeing what a joke this investigation was, as far as San Francisco was concerned, first hand. Seeing what a joke Meg was. Maybe this wouldn’t be as much fun as she’d hoped it would be. 

Either way, she went ahead and set up the meeting, and went down to Clarence’s office to sit across from his desk with Abaddon. Being in there again, the scene of so many scenes of workplace-inappropriate behavior should have made her feel more uncomfortable than it did. As it was, all that she felt was shock at her ex’ appearance. Clarence looked terrible. The eyes that had once been so piercingly blue as to almost be inhuman were now bloodshot and faded from lack of sleep, and his face seemed pale. Funny; she wouldn’t have pegged being the head of the School Resource Office as being the kind of job to make a guy lose much sleep at night. 

She introduced the pair. Abaddon was civil, but cool. Clarence was friendly enough, for a guy who had never been very good with people, but it was clear that something was bothering him. He answered their questions easily enough. No, Ion had been an exemplary School Resource Officer. He’d had no hesitation about recommending him for the promotion when the younger man requested it, although he’d certainly been sorry to lose his services. The students in his schools had all been sorry to see him go. He wished he could have another twenty such officers just like Ion in his schools. 

No, Ion had never shown the slightest bias toward any gender, ethnic minority or sexual orientation. No, Ion had never displayed the slightest concern about his pay, about financial difficulties or about any financial or legal difficulties facing any relatives or loved ones. Like he’d said, Ion was a model employee. 

As he spoke, Clarence’s eyes moved around the room. They periodically caught Meg’s and moved back to the phone, to the computer, to a potted plant in the corner. Of course, he got to have a potted plant in the corner because he wasn’t stuck off in a smelly basement, but why would he keep doing that? Was he trying to draw her attention to it? She very carefully and deliberately didn’t point or ask outright, but subtly gestured with her chin toward the computer. She looked down at his desk and, in a space that was carefully shaded by her chest, she traced out the word, “bug” with her finger.

Almost imperceptibly, still speaking to Abaddon, he nodded.

Meg let Abaddon continue with her questions, only jumping in to add a few of her own so that it wouldn’t look suspicious. She knew that they wouldn’t be answered honestly. When the interview was over she put a hand deliberately onto her companion’s arm. “Hey, you know what?” she asked in a cheerful voice, leading her out of the office. She could see Ruby, again not even trying to be subtle, following her at a distance that was at least respectable. “Last night was kind of late and I’m just dying for a decent cup of coffee. Not the swill they serve here. Come on, let’s go grab a latte.”

She had to count it as a win if she’d finally gotten Abaddon to look a little flustered; a little bit of red crept into those pale cheeks of hers when Meg had grabbed her arm. “I’m sorry?” she blinked. 

“No, really,” she insisted. “Come on, there’s a great little coffee shop down the road.” She led the taller woman out the front door, past the protestors and toward a Dunkin’ Donuts three blocks away.

Abaddon frowned. “They don’t serve lattes here.”

“I think they do,” Meg told her, “but no one comes here for that. Castiel’s office is being bugged.”

The prosecutor paused. “I can’t say that I’m surprised,” she admitted. “I mean, Crowley seems like the kind of guy to stoop to that level. Is that what you were doing when you were doodling on his desk? Passing notes?”

She shrugged. “It seemed like the best way to know for sure. I mean, he can be kind of twitchy; he’s not at his best when he’s interacting with people.”

“And here I thought it was just me.” She picked up her coffee and sipped it. “He’s worried about you.”

“No. He doesn’t care what happens to me. We had a… um, a thing, years ago. He made his feelings perfectly clear.” 

Abaddon paused, maybe for a little longer than necessary. “Really?”

Meg toyed with her coffee cup. “It was probably a bad idea. I’d been kicked down to IAD for about a year; he’d just taken the job at schools. It was a distraction, nothing more. He would never have taken something more from Captain Azel’s daughter.” She didn’t make a face. 

“I’m sorry. I didn’t realize you were straight.” 

Meg laughed out loud. “That’s your takeaway? I’m not.” 

Abaddon’s shoulders lost a lot of their tension and she smiled, a genuine smile that made Meg melt a little. “Oh. Well. I’m glad that’s cleared up.” She cleared her throat. “It’s probably a safe bet that your office is bugged too, and maybe your house. Fortunately we’ve been meeting at the hotel; I think we should continue to do that. I don’t think the Winchesters will object, especially once we tell them what’s going on.” 

“No, and I’m not so keen on having them at my house either."

“I thought you said you trusted Sam,” Abaddon frowned.

“Oh, I do. In this case. He and Dean have still had a grudge against my father since before little Sammy was even born, and I’m the only one left.” She looked away. “I’m pretty sure that Dean’s the only one with a grudge against the whole family, but that doesn’t mean that I’m keen to cozy up to them, you know?”

“Makes sense,” she said diplomatically. “For now, why don’t we go about our business and meet up back at the hotel tonight?”

That night, they just met up in the Winchesters’ common room. They’d gotten a two-bedroom suite, not seeing a need to spend money on two singles when they could use the common room as conference space. Dean was pacing the room while it sounded like Sam was in the shower, maybe. “I have no idea what he’s doing in there,” Dean groused, rolling his eyes. “I think he’s on some kind of strange workout kick, I swear, you get him back into California for like three minutes and he’s back to all sorts of weird shit.” 

They didn’t want to get into any deep discussions without Sam, so they settled in to wait. After about ten minutes, the door to Sam’s room opened, but it wasn’t Sam who came out.

The woman who emerged was maybe an inch or two taller than Meg, with light brown hair and a very becoming blush. “Uh, Sam?” she called. “I think we lost track of time.” 

Sam rushed to the door, dressed only in a tee shirt and jeans. Well, the kid had grown, and not just gotten taller. Hell if little Sammy wasn’t built now, no longer the skinny and gawky rookie. Dad had always said he had it in him. “Er,’ he choked. “Hi guys. This is Cara. Cara, these are my colleagues, my brother Dean, Abaddon Sands, and Meg Masters.” 

She smiled at the rest of them, poised and friendly even in the face of embarrassment. “Well, I’d better be going. Still on for that game tomorrow night, Sam?”

“You bet, Cara,” he replied with an easy grin. 

He escorted her down to the lobby. Meg found herself gaping just as much as Dean or Abaddon. “Well,” the former declared. “That was unexpected.” 


	3. Chapter 3

Sam returned to the room with a resigned look on his face. It seemed to be justified, because his brother was on his feet almost as soon as he closed the door behind himself. “Really, Sam? She could be mired in with all this and you just had to go out and get your –"

Sam held up a hand. “Dr. Roberts has been very concerned about the processing and treatment of probable trafficking victims,” he interrupted, “for years. She’s been at this office for three years and she’s been keeping records. She doesn’t handle all of the trafficking cases that come through the ME’s office. She didn’t handle the two Jane Does involved with the Liu and Cho deaths. But she was able to get some interesting information.”

Abaddon frowned. “Did you sleep with that poor woman just to get information?” she accused.

“No. I went to her office just to talk.” He flopped down into one of the chairs. The look on his face didn’t scream, “I just got laid.” Instead his face was drawn, his eyes shadowed. “One thing led to another.”

“I’ll say,” Dean harrumphed. “I hope that you got some very good information out of her for all that.”

“Oh for God’s sake,” Meg interrupted, standing up. “Can we not? You pretty much tried to do the same thing when the subject first came up. Is it just because she didn’t want you that you’re feeling all bitter?” 

Sam startled while Dean wheeled to face the detective. “Well I have to say that it’s a little suspicious that she wouldn’t even meet with me only a few days before and then all of a sudden she turns around and is literally all over him!”

“Wait a minute, she never even saw you? As in, literally wouldn’t meet with you?” Abaddon frowned, leaning forward despite her evident disapproval of what had just happened here.

“She said that police officers have been hassling her and others at the ME’s office,” Sam pointed out. “She said there’s always a guy from Major Crimes there when they do the autopsies on the sex workers, or even on the suspected sex workers. I wonder if she didn’t figure that you were one of them.” 

Meg smirked at Dean. “Well, your whole… look does scream ‘cop.’” He smirked back at her and took a sip from his flask.

“That’s an interesting tactic.” Abaddon rested her cheek against her hand. “Literally monitoring the autopsies of every Jane Doe that comes through there. It must get exhausting.” 

“And all this wound up with you guys coming back to your hotel why?” Dean scowled, waving the flask at him.

“Oh. Her office is bugged.” Sam made a face.

“Wait – they’ve bugged the ME’s office too?” Meg exploded, sitting down in the chair opposite her half-brother. “This is absurd. Over a single rookie detective’s officer-involved shooting? I mean, this is something that’s not likely to get the kid more than a slap on the wrist, a couple of months riding a desk! You have got to be kidding me!” 

“Wait, too?” Sam and Dean turned to face her with identical movements, speaking at the same time. It was creepy; they needed to spend some time apart.

“Some offices at headquarters were bugged,” Abaddon explained. “To include that of Ion’s former supervisor.”

“Sam, do you remember Clarence Castiel?” Meg asked him, struck by the sudden thought that they might have known each other. “I’m sure you must have met once or twice.”

“Ah, yes.” He folded his lips together and looked away. “He didn’t much like me, I’m afraid.”

“Huh.” That was surprising; she’d thought everyone liked Sam, back in the day. “Well, anyway. He’s looking awful. I don’t think he’s sleeping much and if his office is getting bugged then he’s definitely got something to hide. What I don’t get is why this is being done. Ion is a kid, a junior detective and even that’s being kind of generous. If it were just an officer-involved shooting this would just be something that blew over. There wouldn’t be… surveillance.” She stood up, looking around herself. “Oh my God, do you think your room is being bugged right now?”

“Nope.” Dean grinned. “Thought of that already. Between Geek Boy over there and me, we’ve already dealt with it. I guess Dad’s training paid off sometimes, huh, Sammy?” 

Sam’s answering smile looked forced. “Okay. So since none of this is normal for just a typical officer-involved shooting, I’m feeling like we have to go on the assumption that there’s something seriously shady going down, that it involves an awful lot of people at Major Crimes and that Crowley’s at the center of it.” He rubbed at his face. “It doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s a civil rights violation, but it’s still shady and gross and needs to be stopped. Right?”

“It doesn’t mean that it’s not a civil rights violation either,” Dean added. “I mean, all of that stuff about Ion just walking around looking for Asian men to pin stuff on seemed pretty diametrically opposed to the fourteenth amendment to me. If nothing else we’re not coming out of this without a win, Sammy.” 

“Right. Well, there’s that.” Meg smiled thinly at them. She’d almost forgotten that they weren’t really all on the same team, just all working against the same people. Good thing Dean was around to remind her; she might have gotten carried away or something.

Work picked up over the next week, and they hadn’t even gotten to the part where they asked any cops any real questions yet. Dr. Roberts slowly started passing them information via contacts with Sam. Meg got to know her a little better as they passed each other at the hotel; she seemed nice enough. Intelligent, direct, brave and bold. Sam was – for once – being honest about his intentions and she was aware that there was some risk, but she was willing to take that risk. “None of those people in those lockers downtown volunteered to be there,” she shrugged. “I want to help stop it from happening to any more people.” 

On Wednesday Meg came out of the office to find her tires slashed – three of them, so her insurance company wouldn’t pay for the tow or to replace them. Abaddon came to pick her up, silently fuming as long as people were around. Once they were in the car with the doors closed, however, she let loose. “They went after your car?” she objected. Meg had never seen her angry, and she had to admit that she kind of liked seeing so much passion in her. Her hands gripped the wheel, her hair moved with her words as her head jerked with rage. “They went after your car? I know I said that I was concerned for your safety but Meg, this is just… I mean, it’s petty! If they’re going to come after you, they should come after you not this… penny-ante crap!”

Meg let herself grin. Abaddon had been almost strictly professional since confirming that Meg was, indeed, interested in women but it was nice to see her passions so aroused. “It’s the beginning,” she pointed out. “They’d do this to any kind of a whistleblower, really. Anyone who cooperated with an outside investigation, which is what I’m doing. It’s under orders; they just happen to be nice orders.” 

Those incredible eyes glanced at her for a moment. “Nice orders, huh?”

“Well, I mean, it’s no secret that I’ve never liked Crowley. That’s why the first thing he did when he took over Major Crimes was to get rid of me. But they’re also… nice orders.” She let herself meet Abaddon’s eyes. “I mean, the state was nice enough to send their very best special prosecutor.”

“Their best?” Abaddon grinned. “Is that all?”

“The best, the most competent, the scariest and the best looking.” Meg chuckled. “Crowley’s going to be shaking once he gets a load of you.” 

“Well then,” Abaddon purred. “Let’s make sure he gets a nice big dose.”

The Winchesters agreed, once informed of the situation, that it was probably time to turn up the heat on Crowley just a little bit. It was funny, Meg thought. Ion had become almost an afterthought in the whole affair; the men he’d killed just names on a piece of paper. They were real people, and people who were almost certainly innocent of the crimes reported about them. They’d (probably) been fighting something huge, something larger than themselves, and now after death they’d been caught up in something larger than themselves again. The men themselves had fallen into the cracks between these two monoliths; she hoped that after everything was all said and done that they could be pulled out. 

Meg and Abaddon decided to set up a meeting with Ion two days after Meg’s tires were slashed. Abaddon wanted to have the meeting earlier, but Ion had the right to have his union rep with him at the meeting and he was invoking that right now. The meeting was held in Meg’s office, because Meg could control the atmosphere and the temperature and she could make sure that the visitors’ chairs were as uncomfortable as possible and because dear little brother Sam had hacked the surveillance devices and was recording the entire mess from his hotel room. She wasn’t sure that was strictly legal, but she figured that was his job to know, not hers. That was why they had two lawyers on the team, right?

Abaddon sat beside Meg, in an office chair that she borrowed from one of the admins who was out on maternity leave. If she found it uncomfortable, she didn’t say so. Ion showed up to the meeting precisely on time. His union rep, against all logic and probability, was Crowley. 

Meg bit her tongue. This had to be contrary to union regulations – she would have to check her own handbook later, when she got home. He was what the union was supposed to guard against, or part of it anyway. How could he possibly be the union rep? But hey – Crowley had gotten her reassigned down into IAD so he obviously had some pull. The smarmy bastard introduced himself to Abaddon, who had a cold and polite response to him. She was marginally more polite to Ion. Marginally. 

_I see_ , Meg thought to herself. _Good cop, bad cop_. It would have been good to discuss this beforehand, but she guessed it made sense. After all, Abaddon was the big bad special prosecutor coming in from Sacramento. That kind of had Bad Cop tattooed on its forehead. “Alright. Ion, I’m glad you could make it. First of all, I want to assure you that this is not a formal IAD hearing. This is just a meeting to get your side of the story, get a sense for what really happened.”

“Detective Ion has already given a statement. What really happened has been described for the record in its entirety. I should think that the San Francisco Police Department would have better things to do with its detectives than to have them sat around in meetings all day. Crime is happening, Josh’s talents are best used solving them.” Crowley smirked at Meg. “Not playing nanny to a bunch of grown adults who’ve long since outgrown the nursery.” 

Someday Crowley was going to burn for that, but there were witnesses right now. “Be that as it may, this case has attracted a great deal of attention,” Meg told him in a calm voice. “The people of the city are concerned about the goings on in the police department, and it’s our job to satisfy them that they can have trust in the men and women who carry these badges. I want nothing more,” she said directly to Ion, leaning forward and looking into his eyes, “than to be able to go out and tell the world that they have nothing to fear. That two human traffickers are off the streets and while it’s a shame that we couldn’t have taken them alive, you had no other choice and that the Department has done its duty to ensure that everything is on the up and up.” She leaned back a little and gave him her very best sincere smile. “And I’m positive that this is the conclusion we’ll come up with.”

“Then why are we bothering with this face at all?” Crowley waved a hand leisurely. “If you know that Ion is in the right, and I know that Ion is in the right, and Ion certainly has no doubt in his mind that he is in the right, then why are we even bothering with the charade of sitting here in this office? Those people out there, who’ve been protesting for weeks, they don’t care that we’re sat in here talking about this like civilized people. They want to see poor Josh’s head on a pike.”

Ion flinched at that. The poor kid’s eyes were bloodshot, and his hand shook the few times Meg was allowed to see it. He was terrified.

“Because, Lieutenant Crowley, we’re obligated to follow the rule of law,” Abaddon pointed out in a harsh tone. “That means that even though we believe in Detective Ion’s innocence unless he’s proven guilty, we’re obligated to follow all of the laws and ensure that there’s been no wrongdoing. Someone somewhere must have some inkling that not everything’s on the up-and-up, because it got to a point that a special prosecutor was called in.” She gave Crowley a bright smile. “That would be me, by the way.” 

“That wouldn’t be someone with a special axe to grind against me, now, would it?” the Englishman objected. “Because honestly, that’s just absurd and if anyone should be prosecuted it should be her, for wasting state funds and a state prosecutor’s time on something like poor Ion’s sad incident here. I mean, those men were trying to kill him, with guns –"

Abaddon held up a single pale hand, and Crowley shut up. “Guns that were melted down within days of the incident, Lt. Crowley. Which seems unusually expeditious, considering that there is evidence still sitting in lockup from the Zebra Killers.” She gave a tiny, shark-like smile.

For the first time, Crowley looked the slightest bit uncomfortable. “I’m sure I don’t know what happened there. Shouldn’t that be something that Internal Affairs looks into?”

“Of course,” Meg told him sweetly. “Any time that a case is endangered because the chain of custody is interrupted, Internal Affairs naturally gets curious. I noticed that the destroy order on that evidence was signed by you personally, Lt. Crowley.” 

“Impossible,” he sniffed. “At any rate, none of this has anything to do with young Joshua here. What exactly is it that you would like to know?” His face was perfectly calm and his voice even, but a little sheen of sweat had started to reflect the fluorescent light on the top of his head.

Meg and Abaddon exchanged glances before the former cleared her throat. Did Abaddon want her to lead off? She supposed she could get started just as easily. They were in her office, after all. “Detective Ion,” she began, as gently as she could, “I’m curious. What led you to believe that Mr. Liu and Mr. Cho were engaged in human trafficking?”

“They fit the description of two known human trafficking suspects,” Crowley snapped. “Who happened to have, in their custody, two young girls who we had received prior notice were going to be transported into the city for trafficking purposes that night.” 

Abaddon nodded, once, and looked down at her notes. “And your source was…”

“Confidential informant,” the supervisor told them.

“Come on, Crowley. You know that doesn’t hold. It won’t be released to the papers or in a courtroom, but you need to tell us who the informant was if you want us to be able to back you up.” Meg put the folder in her hands onto the desk, closed, and folded her hands on top of it. 

“The word, Detective, is ‘confidential.’ I suggest you look it up.” Crowley glanced at Ion. “Look, it’s not as though it matters. The fact is that they had the girls in their custody, they were dragging them away and they shot at Joshua.”

“Actually, they were members of a community group that tries to rescue trafficked women,” Abaddon informed the men, while Meg carefully watched Ion’s face. His mouth didn’t move, but his eyes – those tightened as they darted toward Crowley. “According to these members of the community, those two men were out trying to rescue those girls.” 

Crowley didn’t miss a beat. “If that’s true – which I highly doubt – then they were out putting themselves in harm’s way by interfering with police business. But there’s no way that they were trying to rescue anyone. They’re just pulling the wool over your eyes, which is why you couldn’t hack it in Major Crimes. Those men were known traffickers.”

“Based on?” Meg addressed her question to Ion. She knew Crowley would be the one to answer, but she directed her question to Ion anyway, just to see how he reacted.

“They fit the description of human trafficking suspects.” Crowley repeated the words in a singsong voice and rolled his eyes. Ion looked down and licked his lips, but Crowley kept up his dog-and-pony show. “Are we done here? I’m fairly certain that there are real crimes to solve, rather than wasting resources on the deaths of two scumbags whom no one will miss.”

“I’m reasonably sure that we’re done with Detective Ion for the time being,” Abaddon replied in her measured purr. “We’ll probably have more questions for him another time. In the meantime, if you can come up with any hard evidence backing your claim against Mr. Liu or Mr. Cho, please let me know. It would be extremely helpful to your cause.”

They left the office soon after that, retreating to the Winchesters’ hotel room. Sam had set up a nice little workstation with a spare laptop that would let him monitor the bugs that Crowley’s team was using. “Did you get all that?” Abaddon asked him without preamble.

“Yup,” he told her, not minding the rudeness. “Recorded everything. It’s already saved to a server back in Washington, with a copy in your in box.” 

“And you’re both sure that this is legal,” Meg pressed.

“Everyone is informed when entering the headquarters building that the entire premises are monitored via video surveillance,” Abaddon assured her. “It’s fine. If anything, his wiretap is illegal because it was performed without a warrant.”

Sam ran his fingers through his hair. “I got a warrant. Federal. Came through today.”

“Oh?” Both Abaddon and Meg turned to look at him. “What exactly does it cover?”

“Well, anything that happens inside the station is covered by the instructions the chief gave to you, Meg. As the investigator anything that you then choose to turn over to us is at your discretion. I mean, you’d probably have to come testify at a federal trial, but yeah. But it covers anything that anyone from the Major Crimes unit might say or do via electronic means or via telephone.” He grinned a little, the closest to a real grin that she’d seen from him since their reunion. “And I get to go through all their computers.”

“Don’t we have to notify them that we’re doing this?” Abaddon wondered.

“Not as part of an ongoing federal investigation, and because it does involve the illegal transport of foreign nationals onto United States soil this involves issues of homeland security.” Sam blushed.

“You got a warrant under the Patriot Act?” Meg gasped.

“Something like that,” he admitted. “It took some fancy footwork but it’s all legal. Trust me.”

Meg snorted, but she couldn’t fault him. “I think I need a bath just thinking about the whole concept of wiretapping people’s communications without their knowledge,” she commented, rubbing her arms.

“Yeah,” he sighed. “I usually get to be the one prosecuting it when it happens to others, not the one doing it.” He turned back to the screen. “Whatever it takes, though, right? It is legal, and he’s using a position of authority to at the very least shelter a killer. I suspect something worse. I mean, every time a dead sex worker is brought into the ME’s office a detective sits through the autopsy and directs it? Like, tells the ME what to write down and what to put in their report? That just isn’t right.” 

“Why haven’t they reported that?” Meg wondered. “I mean, that alone would be enough to nail them.”

Abaddon put a hand on her shoulder. “Because they probably don’t think anything would be done. They’re scared. It’s not because of you personally.”

Meg let herself lean into the touch, just a little. “Okay. Um. So we’ve rattled Crowley’s cage a bit. What next?”

“We’ve got warrants, right?” Abaddon grinned. “We listen.”

Sam glanced at the women. “Okay. Well, I’ve got some super secret Justice Department stuff to do… so…”

Meg stared at him for a moment, but he met her eyes squarely and glanced at Abaddon’s hand. The hand that still rested on her shoulder. “Oh – right. You’ve probably just got a hot date with Dr. Roberts,” she teased. 

“That too,” he added with another little real smile. “I gotta go coif my hair or something.”

Meg ushered Abaddon out, and the prosecutor took her across the street to her own hotel. “Well, I suppose that we can work until Dean gets back from wherever it is that he’s gone,” she suggested. “I mean, it’s been what, two weeks, three? I guess we’re entitled to a night off, too. We won’t tease out the details of whatever’s going on with Major Crimes in one night either way.” She glanced at Meg, expression neutral.

Meg paused. “Are you suggesting that we go out… socially?”

“Maybe just the two of us?” Abaddon confirmed. “In a social and maybe slightly overly friendly context?”

Meg smiled. “Can we start with a bar? Since we’re off the clock and all?” 

Abaddon was more than happy to start with a bar; she picked one near the hotel that was a little more upscale than Meg usually liked but with a date like that Meg wasn’t complaining about anything. She ordered a gin and tonic; Abaddon’s drink was a martini with a twist as a garnish instead of olives, a little bit of a quirk that Meg hadn’t really seen before. “So,” Meg said by way of breaking the ice. “Special Prosecutor for the State of California. That sounds…”

“Lawyering isn’t exciting to anyone who isn’t a lawyer,” her date admitted. “I’m not just a special prosecutor. I’m a normal prosecutor too. But when these types of cases come up, where a local prosecutor has to recuse himself or when it’s a special case like this one, then yeah. I’m usually the one sent in.” 

“So you must travel all over the state,” she prompted.

“Pretty much. I’ve even done work up near Donner Pass.” She shook her head. “Called one of my old law school professors and told him to eat his heart out. I think he thought I was kidding.” She took a sip from her drink, still looking somehow delicate. “And you’ve lived in San Francisco all your life.”

“You bet.” 

“Never left?”

“I went away on vacations a few times.” She grinned. “My dad might have been – well, the devil, really, or close to it. But he was still my dad, and he raised us both to have a strong devotion to the city. I mean, we were both expected to become cops here. And we did. We wanted to be good ones.” She grimaced, thinking about Tommy. He’d been a good cop.

“Do you ever think about leaving, working somewhere else?”

_I think about losing myself in your smile_ , she almost blurted out. Fortunately she still had enough presence of mind to say, “Nah. I mean, where would I go? After what happened with my dad? No other police force would ever take me. I’m lucky to be stuck in my cellar, waiting to collect my pension.”

“I think you’re underestimating your talent. But it could be that this is your opportunity to shine. This case is a good chance to showcase what you’re capable of. I’m seeing it, the Winchesters are seeing it.” She reached out and put a hand on Meg’s.

“The Winchesters won’t say a goddamn good thing about me,” she snorted. “My father ruined their lives.” Abaddon’s hand on hers was like a rope for a drowning woman; she could cling to it and think she was connected to something again. It was false hope, of course; Abaddon was going to go back to Sacramento eventually and Meg would be left here with nothing. But for now, they were both here and attracted.

“You’re not your father. I think Sam sees that. He seems to respect you.” She offered a shy, small smile. “He was very encouraging of you coming out here tonight.” 

Here she was getting all mopey about her career and her family again when she had the most beautiful and wonderful woman in the world sitting right across from her. Stupid! “That’s true, he was. I’ll have to send him a fruit basket.” She sipped from her drink. “So. Are you from California originally?”

“Actually I’m not. I was born and raised in Normal, Illinois. It’s a nice enough place I suppose, but if there’s one thing I wasn’t it was normal.” They shared a giggle at the joke. “I’m ambitious. I’ve always been. I’ve always been a fighter – seen something that I wanted, a goal that I needed to achieve, and gone after it.” 

Meg looked at Abaddon, looked into her eyes, and knew the feeling. “Does that leave you with time for hobbies?” she asked, toying with her glass.

“I watch baseball if I have time.” Abaddon smiled.

Meg let her mind think about getting to second with Abaddon. “Do you have a favorite team?”

“Right now I’m a fan of the Giants.” 

They finished their drinks among more small talk. Meg learned that Abaddon also had an interest in motorcycles, a passion they shared. They discovered that a dinner is much more relaxed and pleasant without the Winchesters along, which again struck Meg as odd, but she wasn’t going to think about the brothers grim right now. After dinner, as they prepared to leave the restaurant, Abaddon asked Meg to stop back at her room. “Just for a little while, if that’s okay.”

It was more than okay, and Meg followed the redhead out of the restaurant. Before they could begin the short walk back to the hotel, though, they found themselves approached by a tall, slender, fresh-faced young blond man whose entire carriage and being just screamed, “cop.” 

Abaddon put herself between Meg and the cop even as Meg reached for her gun and badge. “Hold it right there, buddy,” the lawyer demanded in a tone that would not be disobeyed. “Where exactly do you think you’re going?”

“I – I’m here to give something to Meg Masters,” the man said. “It’s from Lt. Castiel.” He kept his hands where the women could see them, although he didn’t raise them for fear of causing a scene. “I’m sorry – I’m just a school resource officer. I don’t mean to cause any trouble.” 

Meg kept her gun on the young man while Abaddon approached. “Who are you?” 

He slowly reached into his pocket and pulled out a flash drive. “Officer Alfie Samandriel. I mostly work in middle schools.” 

Of course this kid worked in middle schools. He was too young for high school kids to take him seriously. For crying out loud, how did they let kids this young even go to the Academy? Meg lowered the gun. No one else on the street seemed to have noticed, but that didn’t mean that they wouldn’t eventually. “Did he say why he wanted you to deliver this?” Abaddon demanded. 

“He said someone was watching him. I mean, it was weird, ma’am. He made me come into the men’s room with him and he passed it to me while he was pretending to… you know.” A deep blush spread out over his pale face.

“That Clarence.” Meg shook her head. “Always with the stealth. How did he know where to find me?”

“Oh, he didn’t. I followed you from headquarters.” He smiled. Maybe the kid had some cop in him after all. “Look, if he went to all that trouble to hide that thing, I’m pretty sure I don’t want to know what’s on it. It’s enough for me to know that it’s important; I believe in Lt. Castiel.” He backed away, disappearing into the night.

The women looked at each other. It wasn’t much of a detour to drop the flash drive off with Sam. Meg volunteered herself, letting Abaddon go back to her room and wait while Meg dropped in on Winchesterland. Sam was alone, having lied about the hot date to get the women to go on their own hot date. Meg relayed the story of how she’d acquired the drive, stole some of the hotel mouthwash and then went away again.

Abaddon greeted her at the door, already out of her heels. They looked at each other’s eyes for a moment and then Abaddon leaned down to kiss Meg. Meg didn’t need to pinch herself to be told that this was real, didn’t need to double check. If it was a dream she didn’t want to wake up. Abaddon’s kiss was a fantasy come to life, a vision made real. She cradled Meg’s head in her hands, taking from her mouth everything she had to offer and returning power and confidence and grace and maybe a little minty toothpaste flavor.

They parted, but only for breath before Meg reached out and brought them together again. A tilt of her head and a slip of the tongue deepened the kiss, eliciting a low groan from the fiery prosecutor. Still locked into the kiss, Abaddon guided the pair to a chair, sitting down and pulling Meg down on top of her. 

Meg yielded, straddling her partner much to her partner’s delight. She traced the outline of Abaddon’s jawline with a feather-light touch before going over it again with her lips and the tiniest, most gentle touches of her teeth. Abaddon’s impeccably-manicured hands gripped her shoulders as she hissed with pleasure.

She let Abaddon help her remove her suit jacket; after all, there was no point in getting the thing all wrinkled, and it meant that those perfect hands would be one layer closer to being where she wanted them – on her bare skin, anywhere on her bare skin. She could already feel their heat through the thin cotton of her blouse; it was enough to have her feeling warmer already.

But it was not enough for Abaddon, who was mouthing along her neck. She wanted to bite, she wanted to bite so badly but they had to go to work and she couldn’t. Meg could practically feel her holding back. “These buttons,” she growled out as she fussed with Meg’s blouse, “are a pain.” 

“Close enough,” Meg decided, once enough buttons had come undone to pull the blouse over her head. It was bad for the blouse or so she’d been told, she’d lose buttons that way eventually, but she didn’t care. Right now she had Abaddon looking at her body, just her in a lacy bra and Abaddon’s hungry blue eyes on her. 

Her own hands hadn’t been idle; Abaddon’s blue blouse hung open before her to reveal her own beautiful skin. Meg couldn’t help but want to touch it, taste it. She caressed Abaddon’s face with her hand again, this time letting the hand travel down lower, enjoying the feel of that smooth, hot flesh under her hand. Their lips met again, but only briefly. Abaddon moved her head to bring her lips further down, nuzzling Meg’s neck and nibbling along her clavicle. One hand passed along Meg’s left breast, drawing out a gasp from her.

Naturally, that was when both phones rang at once. Meg inched back slightly, groaning in an entirely different manner. “We could always just ignore them,” she suggested.

“Not if they’re both going off,” Abaddon sighed. “Might as well see what the boys want.” 

Sam was the one calling Meg. “This had better be important,” she told him.

“The gun found on William Liu was used at another murder,” he told her. “Dean’s got his FBI buddy locking down the evidence so their techs can grab the gun for us, but we need to get down there and deal with this mess.”

From the look on Abaddon’s face, she was getting a similar message. “Fine,” Meg sighed. “We’ll be down in front as soon as I can find my shirt.”


	4. Chapter 4

The team piled into one vehicle and raced down to Headquarters, where a scowling, red-faced Crowley was facing off against a tall, bald FBI agent whose handsome face took “not having any of your shit today” to an art form. The unit chief stopped himself in mid-rant when he saw Meg and Abaddon, walking away from the amused agent to accost his least favorite people. “What the bloody hell is the meaning of this?” he roared, pointing backwards at the stranger. “Last time I checked a bloody murder is a major crime, and Major Crimes’ business. It’s not any concern of Internal Affairs and it’s certainly not any business of the F. B. Bloody I. if some hooker gets herself shot in the Tenderloin!”

Behind her, Meg heard Sam tense up. Dean stepped in. “I see you’ve met Very Special Agent Victor Henricksen from the FBI. The evidence he’s seizing is linked to an ongoing federal investigation, as I’m sure he’s explained.” Dean interposed himself physically between the team and Crowley, bringing his badge out and offering his most professional smile. “I’m Special Agent Dean Winchester.”

“Winchester, eh?” Crowley sniffed, nose in the air. “Winchester or no, you have no right to seize evidence from San Francisco lockup.”

Sam cleared his throat noisily. “I think you’ll find, Lt. Crowley, that we do. This warrant should explain things clearly.” He passed a piece of paper, folded into three parts over to the angry Englishman. “In the meantime I’m sure you’ll give us your full cooperation with this important federal investigation.” Meg couldn’t quite see his face, but his voice dripped with sincerity. “We are, after all, on the same side here.”

Crowley’s lip curled as he accepted the warrant. His eyes scanned over the document even as some of Henricksen’s men returned from the evidence locker with a box. “I suppose that everything seems to be in order,” he admitted, albeit reluctantly. Here, now. You look familiar. Sammy Winchester, isn’t it?”

“It’s Sam, thanks.” Sam’s voice betrayed nothing.

“You look so much taller when you’re on your feet instead of your knees. My, you’ve grown into quite the moose, haven’t you?” He chuckled darkly and walked out of the room, followed by some of the Major Crimes detectives. Funny – Meg hadn’t even really noticed their presence.

“Good to see you again, Vic,” Dean grinned, sharing a manly embrace with the strange agent. Henricksen’s answering smile was blinding, dazzling and genuine. “Let’s move this to your lockup instead of this one, shall we?”

“Anything you want, sarge,” the friendly agent agreed, shaking his head. “Let’s head on down, catch up on some stuff.” 

Dean rode down with Agent Henricksen, leaving Sam to stretch out in Abaddon’s backseat. “Sam, I didn’t realize that you and Crowley had any kind of interaction,” Meg commented, looking out the window. 

Sam’s face got that flat, nostril-flaring look he got when he was pissed and couldn’t do anything about it at the moment. “I was new to the PD – maybe a month or two in – and my CO knew I wanted to make a good impression on Captain Azel. Didn’t know why.” He huffed out a little, just a minor exhalation. “He, Crowley, was still at Vice and he was setting up a sting for johns. Johns with a certain clientele. So my CO thought it would be a great idea to recommend me for the undercover part.” He smirked. “Apparently they didn’t have a lot of twink-y looking guys already working Vice, who knew? So they asked me to take part and I said, ‘sure.’ And Crowley had me audition. You know. To make sure I could ‘really’ pull it off.” 

“Oh my God.” Abaddon’s face had almost completely retreated into her head, so deep was the expression of her disgust. “Seriously? Didn’t you talk to someone about that? I mean that’s beyond simple sexual harassment.”

“Who was I going to tell? Besides, I had a goal.” Meg glanced into the rearview mirror and saw that Sam was chewing on his nails. “I couldn’t let anything interfere with that. So I went along with it.” He sighed. “I’m not saying that it was fun, or anything. But it got the job done.” 

Meg felt sick. She’d always just thought of what Sam had done as being cruel to her, to their family. He’d put himself through the wringer too. “Does Dean know?”

“Heh. No.” Sam put his hand down and put his head back against the window.

“Except he’ll figure it out from what Crowley just said,” Abaddon frowned.

“No, he won’t. There’s some things that Dean just doesn’t like to know about his baby brother. I’m pretty sure he still thinks I’m a virgin, and the last time he had to fill out a hospital form for me he listed me at five foot two.” He rolled his eyes. “That’s what brothers are like, I guess.” 

“Your brother, maybe,” Meg snorted. Tommy had been good, a good brother. He’d been a little defensive, but he hadn’t had any ridiculous ideas about Meg being some kind of little kid. “How does he know Henricksen?”

“I think he’s an Army buddy,” Sam shrugged. “Not sure about much from Dean’s Army days. He went legit his way and I went mine, you know?” He looked out the window for a moment, and Meg decided she didn’t want to press the issue. She wasn’t interested in how Dean had managed to get out from under John Winchester’s shadow, only in the extent to which they could trust this Henricksen fellow. 

They arrived at the Federal Building not long afterward, with Sam stretching as soon as he could get out of the car. Did they even make cars that fit him comfortably? Sam signed them in and they raced up to the floor occupied by the FBI’s field office here, which just seemed creepy at this time of night. “We’ve got the evidence secured,” Dean informed them, leading them to a conference room walled in by glass. Meg idly wondered how much it would cost to get something like this at IAD. Probably a lot more than anyone would ever be willing to spend on that department.

“All right, so, what’ve we got?” Dean wanted to know. “I took the liberty of catching my buddy here up on what we know, what we suspect. Vic, these are Abaddon Sands, Meg Masters and my little brother Sammy.” Everyone gave a wave. “Back when I first made contact with Vic here, Sammy set up a tickler to let us know if anything from this case showed up again. As it turned out, one of the guns used to kill one of the Jane Does in the Liu and Cho murders was used three nights ago to kill another prostitute.” 

Henricksen pressed a button, and a flat screen hanging on one of the walls flickered to life. “We have another Jane Doe, found four days ago in a dumpster outside the Penny Arcade. No ID, no identifying characteristics that match any missing persons report, also Asian.” 

“How do we know she’s a prostitute?” Meg asked quickly. 

Henricksen paused, then inclined his head slowly. “I’m sorry, you’re right. I should have described her as ‘possible prostitute.’ She was clothed at the time she was found, and she was dressed in clothing usually associated with that particular trade, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that she was a prostitute. Autopsy results do indicate a higher than average level of sexual activity than is consistent with average teen behavior in the days before her death, not all of which was necessarily consensual.” He paused and looked around the room, meeting all of their eyes. “Do you want me to go on?”

They didn’t.

Currently locked in the FBI’s evidence locker where the gun used in the crime, the victim’s clothing, and some of the garbage found in direct contact with her body at the time of her discovery. Ballistics test results were also turned over to Henricksen. “Now I have got to say that I’ve seen some jurisdictional disputes in my time,” the agent concluded, “but I’ve never seen anything like that slimy piece of cheese that I met today.”

Abaddon’s lips quirked up. “No, I can’t imagine that you have. If what we think is happening is true, then I don’t think we’ve seen corruption on this scale before. What happened with Ion was the tip of the iceberg. This is… this is huge.”

“So you think that, what, all of Major Crimes is in on some kind of a, a thing with human trafficking?” Henricksen drew his head back. 

“Not just Major Crimes,” Sam sighed. “I took a look at that flash drive your buddy sent. It’s not just Major Crimes, and it’s not just human trafficking. Want to know why Joshua Ion got along so well with the kids in his schools? Want to know why the drug arrests when down so much when he started working those particular schools?”

Meg hung her head. “Let me guess. He was feeding them tips.”

“For a cut. He wasn’t the only one,” Sam added. He rubbed his temples. “The flash drive contained video. Of, um, of Castiel himself. Of a few others. I guess Naomi Tapping is pretty deep in it, from HR.” 

“Jesus,” Meg whistled. “No wonder no one does anything. You either play ball or you’re out.”

“Pretty much. And out seems to be a pretty unpleasant prospect. I mean, look what happened to Hester Holmes,” Abaddon added. “And wasn’t there an officer killed last year? What was his name, Roche?”

“Balthazar Roche,” Dean confirmed. “He was, uh, he was the one who got word to us that there might be something worth looking into.”

“He was in Major Crimes with me,” Meg recalled. “He and Crowley were never tight but he hadn’t pissed him off the way I had. I guess that changed.” 

Sam’s eyes glittered as he turned to her, not with malice but with unshed tears. “He was a nice guy,” he reminisced fondly. “He was friendly with me. You know, back in the day. He stayed in touch, after.” He cleared his throat. “I’m sorry, Meg, but Castiel confessed something on that flash drive.”

All of Meg’s limbs went cold all of a sudden, like they’d been plunged into separate ice baths. “No.” 

“I’m sorry, Meg. I can show you the video if you want, I kept a copy, but it’s… um, it’s not easy watching.” He glanced at the others, his brother and the random agent and at Abaddon. Abaddon wrapped her arms around Meg with little care as to who might be watching. “In that video,” Sam said slowly, “Lt. Clarence Castiel confessed to having murdered Detective Balthazar Roche because he found out that Balthazar had brought some of his suspicions to federal investigators.” He moistened his lips. “To me.” 

She wouldn’t cry. She wouldn’t. Not here, not in front of all these men. She wouldn’t cry in front of the alien Henricksen, who watched with sympathy and compassion but still didn’t know her from any random girl on the street. She definitely wouldn’t cry in front of Dean Freaking Winchester, who had taken on his daddy’s mantle of hunting her daddy down and been part of the team that shot him like a dog when he broke out of prison.

And sure as hell not in front of Sam, who had come into her life, been welcomed as a brother, only to betray all of them and condemn them. “Well you’re just batting a thousand there, Sammy,” she snarled. “Let’s see. You came into our lives and got our father thrown into jail, my brother murdered just for his name, got me chucked into a dead end job with no release in sight. You came into what’s her name’s life – Jessica? Oh yeah. Got her killed. Madison? Got her killed too. Did ya think I wouldn’t know about that? Jesus. Hell, now you’re telling me that you got Balthazar killed too. You turned Clarence into a killer, a cop killer! Is there anyone, anyone at all whose life you’ve come into that you haven’t destroyed?”

Sam looked down at the table, then back up at Meg. He met her eyes, and he could see in them a sadness so profound that she almost felt bad. Almost. “No one,” he told her quietly. “Not a single soul.” He stood fluidly, reaching into his pocket for the flash drive. “Here’s the drive. I’ve got a copy on my hard drive back at the hotel if I need it. You can stick it into the evidence locker with the rest of the stuff. I’d recommend that no one have access to that locker unless they’re with another one of us – that includes all of us. That way none of us can be coerced into helping Crowley. But that’s just my recommendation; let me know what you want me to do. I’ll catch a cab back.” He walked out of the conference room as the rest of the team watched in stunned silence. 

“All right, then,” Abaddon said after several seconds. She pulled back a little but left a hand on Meg’s back. “I have to say that I agree with Sam’s recommendation. Crowley’s gotten his hooks into a lot of people and I have a lot of trouble believing that San Francisco just habitually hires dirty cops. Everyone has a pressure point; everyone can be bought or sold. He’s safeguarding against that.” 

“Valid,” Dean nodded. Two bright red spots stuck out on his cheeks, like he’d been slapped, but he didn’t say anything about Meg’s outburst.

She only half heard the briefing about the dead sex worker. Clarence was many things, and he hadn’t come even close to doing right by her, but a killer? To have murdered Balthazar in cold blood? That was just too much to believe. There had to be some kind of mistake. And yet – he had been killed, stabbed in the back in Golden Gate Park without putting up any kind of fight. He’d known his attacker, gone there to meet someone he knew and trusted. That could only be Clarence, a close friend. 

How could Clarence be working with Crowley, for crying out loud? He’d always hated the guy! He’d hated him while he’d been in Vice, hated the man’s salesmanship. “A policeman has no place in sales, Meg,” he’d told her. “Our job is to protect and to serve, not to get you a good deal on a used Subaru.” 

But he’d worked with Crowley; he’d killed to protect him and his operation! What could possibly drive him to such an extremity? And, she thought, why come clean now? Where could he have made the recording where Crowley wouldn’t have known to find him and stop him?

She wished there were some way of talking to him directly. There had to be some mistake here, some great trick.

The rest of the night passed by in a blur. Abaddon determined that she shouldn’t be alone that night, a sentiment that was strongly seconded by the remaining team members, but the mood from earlier that night had understandably evaporated. Meg slept on Abaddon’s couch, a far cry from where she’d expected to sleep, for the little sleep she got.

She did go into the office the next day, after a brief stop at home to change and shower. Once at the office she threw herself into her work, trying to forget the events of last night. She didn’t want Clarence back, she’d made that decision long before finding out about his murder of Balthazar, but that didn’t make the sense of betrayal any less. There wasn’t anyone that she could picture less as a killer, much less a cop killer, never mind the murderer of his best friend. It seemed that everything was swimming in her head, spinning around and around…

Wait – when had the door to her office been closed? 

She rubbed at her forehead. She couldn’t be sure when the headache had started, but she was definitely feeling something. Nausea, lightheadedness. Oh, that wasn’t good, because someone had closed the door. Why would someone have closed the door? She got up to check, and yes, the door had been locked, somehow from the outside. That meant she was stuck…

And weather stripping had been added to the door sometime in the night. Her brain was feeling kind of fuzzy right now, not great at all, but somehow she was pretty sure she hadn’t asked to make her little cell airtight. 

Fuck. She’d worked a homicide case like this once before, hadn’t she? And… uh… carbon monoxide poisoning turned you red, right? A quick check of her face in the reverse camera on her cell phone proved that her skin had developed a ruddiness more suited to hours at the gym than sitting on her ass behind a desk. Her phone. She could use the phone. Confusion – that was a symptom of poisoning too, right? She called Abaddon. “Where are you?” she asked the prosecutor, not making time for pleasantries. 

Abaddon paused. “Meg? Are you alright?”

“No. I’ve been sealed into my office and I’m pretty sure they’re poisoning me with carbon monoxide.” 

“The cavalry is on its way.” 

Abaddon wasn’t one for small talk. She hung up the phone; Meg put her phone back in her pocket and sat back to wait.

She wasn’t sure how long she had, but she couldn’t see anyone in the hallway within sight of the sadly shatterproof glass that looked out into the corridor. At least no one was going to sit here and watch her die. That was some small comfort at least, a little bit of dignity here at the end. She shut down her computer – Sam had been certain that he’d gotten to all of the surveillance, but she had no way of knowing whether or not that was just a one-time thing or if he was sitting there watching her suffer.

She’d been mean. She’d been mean to Sam, and she’d meant to be mean to Sam. He’d shattered her life, but he had his reasons for doing it. Clearly it hadn’t brought him much in the way of happiness, and he certainly hadn’t been the one to kill Balthazar. Clarence had. Maybe it had been Sam to whom Balthazar had reached out but Clarence had made the choice, Clarence had thrust that blade into him. And in defense of Crowley. That hadn’t been Sam’s fault, and she’d lashed out at him because she was hurting and she wanted to hurt someone else. She needed to apologize. 

How likely was it that she’d get the chance?

She put her head down on the desk. Staying awake was important. Was it? Or was it kind of pointless? She couldn’t break through the door, there weren’t any windows, there was no exit. All she could do was wait, and if she slept the wait would be less dull. No, she wasn’t bored. Well, she was bored, she’d never been much good at waiting, but she was also exhausted. She hadn’t slept well, insomnia induced by her devastation and no small amount of sexual frustration keeping her eyes open more than she’d have liked. Maybe sleep would be best. It wasn’t like hypothermia, was it? She couldn’t remember, and she didn’t care. If Abaddon got here in time, great. If not, well, she wouldn’t be one more in the string of people who left Meg to rot. Darkness closed in, and Meg wrapped it around herself like a blanket.

She woke up in an ambulance, an oxygen mask on her face and a clip on her finger measuring her O2 saturation. She could hear the siren screaming as they raced toward the nearest hospital. Abaddon sat beside her, holding the hand that wasn’t connected to the monitor and glaring daggers at the EMT. “There we go,” she said in a softer voice than Meg had ever heard from her. “There are those beautiful brown eyes of yours.” She sat back a little when she saw something in Meg’s eyes, maybe that her eyes were truly clear and conscious. “Don’t try to sit up and talk; we’re taking you to the hospital. You’re very sick; the CO levels in that room were obscene.”

“You came for me,” she marveled through the mask. Of course, given that there was an airtight mask around her nose and mouth giving her much-needed oxygen, it came out more like, “Ooo aayy oooh ee.” Abaddon was a smart woman, though. She’d probably get the message.

The hand not holding her own ran through Meg’s hair. “Of course. You didn’t think I’d let you go that easily, did you? Not after last night.” She leaned in close. “We still need to finish what we started.” 

Meg felt her cheeks warm up, and the EMT cleared his throat. “Ma’am, I understand that you’re happy to see each other but your friend is not out of the woods yet so if you could just… try to avoid increasing her heart rate until we get to the hospital that would be super helpful, thanks.” 

Abaddon snarled at him, but cut off her reply when Meg squeezed her hand. “What do you need, Meg?” she asked instead.

“Just you.”

The doctors at the hospital insisted that she be kept overnight for observation. Henricksen came with Captain Milton, much to her surprise and dismay. Out of all of the people that she wanted to see her dressed in a hospital johnny, her ultimate superior was at the bottom of the list. “Detective Masters,” he greeted in his cool voice. “This is not what I expected when I assigned this case to you.”

Meg was never sure if he was pleased with her performance or not. Today was no exception. “I’m reasonably certain that no one expects an assassination attempt at the office, Captain,” Abaddon retorted in an equally cool voice, since Meg’s face was still covered by the mask. “I’m sure it wasn’t on her list of things to do today.”

Milton’s lips twitched upward in what might have been a ghost of a laugh. “No, I’d imagine not. May I ask why you chose to call Ms. Sands instead of someone within our department, given that our department was in the same building and could have reached you sooner?”

Meg looked away, and Henricksen answered for her. “Last night she was with several federal agents as a warrant was served to remove evidence from SFPD custody and place it into federal custody pursuant to an ongoing federal investigation. Given that the attack came the very next day, I suspect that she felt safer calling for Ms. Sands.”

“I see.” Milton’s eyes narrowed. “And the item was deemed too important to remain in SFPD custody because…”

“Because evidence handled by this department, particularly in regards to cases of this nature, has been handled… with extreme laxity. The gun we seized was reported as destroyed when Major Crimes formally closed its investigation into the Liu and Cho murders.” Abaddon was on her feet now; her spot on the bed beside Meg was cold. 

“I see.” He paused. “Would you like for me to remove you from the case, Meg? I never meant to put you in any danger.” 

Her heart caught in her throat. It had always sound like a trite phrase, but someone had helpfully connected her body to all sorts of monitors and she could see that her heart almost skipped a beat. She knew he couldn’t hear anything comprehensible, not beyond a few grunts, so she shook her head as hard as the headache would permit. “No, sir,” she said slowly and clearly. 

Abaddon looked at her. “I’m not okay with you getting hurt,” she objected. 

Meg shrugged and reached out for Abaddon’s hand. Frustrated by the stupid mask, she could only try to express herself by touch. They clasped hands, eyes locked on one another, and then Abaddon turned back to the police chief. “I believe that Meg would prefer to stay the course. Obviously that’s my interpretation, she’ll let you know when she’s got better oxygen sats if she feels differently, but I’m fairly certain that head shake was a refusal to leave the case. I know my office would hire her as a consultant if she were to be removed.” Abaddon smiled, showing teeth.

Milton’s face relaxed. “I’m sure that won’t be necessary. There is absolutely no one that I trust more with this job than Meg Masters.”

“O-kay…” Henricksen interrupted, stepping forward and moving his eyes between the three. “Now that that’s settled. For obvious reasons I think it would be best if we took charge of the investigation into the attack on Detective Masters. I mean, an assassination attempt on an SFPD asset, inside SFPD headquarters? It would be absurd to have that handled in-house; no one would even think of it.”

“Obviously I think the state would be the more proper investigators under normal circumstances,” Abaddon commented, coming back to sit beside Meg, “but you were the one to bring the axe to the scene of the crime. And you already have custody of the crime scene, so there’s that.” 

Henricksen gave her a u-shaped grin. “I’m so glad you approve. Now. I’m also going to be moving all of the investigators to an FBI safe house; I’ve got a team clearing it out right now.”

“I think that’s best,” Milton agreed. “The safer we can keep everyone the better. What about the investigation – I mean, how bad is it?”

“We’re still gathering evidence, sir. But that guy who got sent up for killing Balthazar Roche?” Milton’s features tightened. “I’d start the City on funding a settlement now, because we’ve got a guy on video confessing to the crime.” Meg clenched a fist as Henricksen spoke. Here she’d been giving Sam shit about how he’d been responsible for ruining lives; Clarence had ruined that guy’s life too, sent him to jail with a conviction and everything. “It’s going to rock the department down to its foundations, when it hits.”

“Who was it?” Milton growled.

Abaddon didn’t flinch, but she blanched. “If we told you it could jeopardize the investigation. You would be obligated to take action –"

“You’re damn right I would be obligated to take action!”

“- And that would tip our target off. We can’t have that, not if we want the charges to stick. I’m fairly certain that we can get racketeering charges, possibly terrorism charges in addition to the civil rights charges and human trafficking charges.” Abaddon smiled sweetly. Meg loved her sweet smile. It meant that someone was going to pay.

“Plus, it almost seems like it’s best to have all of the bad news hit at once, sir,” Henricksen told him gently. “It hurts more at the time, but the impact doesn’t last as long. Like tearing off a Band-Aid.” 

Milton huffed out a little laugh at that. “All right. Well, then.” He let himself stroke Meg’s face once, familiarly. “Be safe.” And he left again.

Dean showed up later, much later. That was when Meg got the full story of her rescue. Abaddon had called Henricksen and told him the situation, telling him to get to SFPD headquarters with a crime scene team and an ambulance. She’d beaten him there, despite his sirens and his right-of-way, by three minutes. A “short, unpleasant-looking woman with dark hair tried to stop me from going toward your office,” Abaddon explained. “I think I might have knocked out a few teeth.” 

By this point Meg had been relieved of the stupid mask and put onto a nasal cannula. “Maybe it was Ruby?” she suggested. Not, of course, that any of them would know Ruby from any of the other faceless cops.

“Well, this Ruby will be chewing on the other side of her face for a while,” Henricksen commented with a smirk. “I walked past her and let me tell you, she had some serious swelling going on.” 

Meg turned her head. She and Ruby had once been friends. “Anyway.”

“Anyway, we got there and I was pretty sure Abaddon was trying to undo the hinges from the door,” the tall man informed. “Fortunately I had a decent axe in the car, because you just never know.”

“So you chopped in my office door?” Meg asked him. On the one hand, while she never used it the option for privacy was nice. On the other hand, having her office door chopped down meant that no one could try to seal her into her office and gas her to death, so that was nice too.

“Oh no, no no no.” He laughed and shook his head. “That was all Abaddon.” 

Abaddon snorted. “Well I wasn’t going to just let you die.”

Meg squeezed her hand. “That’s sweet.” 

Dean pretended to gag, or at least she hoped he was pretending. “There are people right here, guys. I mean making out is one thing but mushy stuff?” He made a face. “I didn’t do that with my ex-wife.”

“Note the ‘ex’ part,” Meg sallied. “So, where’s Sam tonight? Is he out with Cara?”

“No. No, he called Cara this morning and broke things off with her.” Dean gave her a tight little smile. “He sends his best wishes, but he didn’t think it was appropriate for him to be here. He’s at the safe house settling in and setting up the electronics.” 

“Oh come on,” Abaddon scoffed. “He’s a professional.” 

“Yeah. Yeah, he is. He’s, uh, he’s got his shit, you know? I don’t know that he needed the reminder. But hey. What’s done is done. We’ll finish the case, get him out of your hair and he can get back to a nice safe courtroom where he freaking belongs.”

Dean left not long after that, and even Henricksen couldn’t make the situation more comfortable so he left too. “I wonder what Dean meant by that,” Abaddon mused.

“I have no idea,” Meg sighed. “But I suppose I should find out. I was a jerk. If he broke things off with the doctor…”

“That’s not on you,” Abaddon told her quickly. “That is not on you. If his skin is that thin he doesn’t belong out in the field.” 

Meg wasn’t sure she believed her, but she wasn’t going to object to being held. 


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ** NSFW art in this chapter **

They let Meg out of the hospital the next day, deciding that the only sign of lasting damage was her decision to stay on the case and return to SFPD. Her release was contingent of course on her resting and not doing anything too strenuous, which Abaddon assured them would be the case. She was therefore bundled into one of the giant black SUVs and driven with careful attention to traffic and any stragglers back to a nice, neat little home in Dolores Heights.

It was different for Meg, being the one under protection instead of being one of the protectors. The agents ushered her into the house and gave her the tour, and she had to admit that the place was nice. “Have you ever had this much firepower in one safe house?” she asked Agent One. 

He snickered. “No. I’m pretty sure that Ms. Sands is the only one without a gun, and I’m pretty sure she wouldn’t ever need one. I heard about that axe."

Meg blushed. No matter what else had happened, someone had chopped down a door for her. Not just someone, but the most beautiful and intelligent and driven woman in the world.

Abaddon’s bedroom was on the third floor, as was Dean’s. That had probably already caused fireworks, she reflected, not sure if she was glad she’d missed it or sorry she’d been deprived of another good show. One more thing to hold against Crowley, she supposed. Sam had taken the bedroom on the top floor, “because he needs to be taller,” her agent quipped. “I haven’t seen him since he took that room, either. Maybe he’s stuck.”

Yeah, sure. Maybe.

She settled in and rested for about half an hour, but she couldn’t get any sleep. She felt too guilty. Dean’s commentary from the night before weighed on her. So did her own words to Sam. She needed to go and apologize to him. She might hate what he’d done to her and her family but that didn’t excuse her actions.

She got up again and slowly climbed the stairs to the top floor. God, she’d thought she was in better shape than this; it had to be the poisoning that was making her suck wind all the way up here. Unfortunately there were two rooms at the top of the stairs, not counting the bathroom. The first one turned out to be used by agents, but the one in there hadn’t gone to sleep yet and directed her to Sam’s room without a problem.

Sam answered the door before she finished knocking; he’d heard her, then. “Hey,” he said softly. “I’m glad you’re okay.” 

She wanted to make a comment about that, but she couldn’t. Sam clearly wasn’t okay. If he’d slept since leaving the conference room that night she’d go out and do wind sprints up and down one of those staircases that brought all the tourists to this neighborhood. “Thanks,” she said instead. “Mind if I come in?”

He hesitated, and she decided to take that for permission. An FBI safe house wasn’t exactly designed for comfort or aesthetics; the room held exactly one bed and one chair, along with a card table. Meg sat in the folding chair, noticing the array of laptops on the folding table. “How many of these things do you travel with, anyway?”

“They spontaneously generate,” he told her with a straight face. “It’s how I supplement my income – my very own line of self-generating laptops. At this rate I’ll be able to retire at forty.”

She snickered, covering her mouth with her hand. “You always were funny. We always liked that about you, your sense of humor.” And they had, too. Nights around the dinner table had seen them all laughing, to include the kid. He’d seemed to enjoy that reaction, to take genuine pleasure in being part of their family. Even Meg’s mother, who had the most to lose by his presence, had grown to love the boy.

He went still. “Thanks,” he said after a few seconds’ silence.

She looked away. “I heard you broke things off with Dr. Roberts.”

He shrugged, looking toward the window. “Yeah.”

“Sam, why? She was crazy about you, you seemed pretty into her –"

“So?” His voice sounded like it had been dragged over a mile of gravel. “I’m still going back to DC after this is over. It’s not like ‘things’ had a chance of going anywhere. And it’s for the best anyway. She’s a fantastic woman with a lot of good things going for her. She doesn’t deserve something like me in her life.”

Fuck. “Sam…”

“Like I said. I’m going away, remember?” He got up from the wall he was leaning against and looked out the window.

“Look,” Meg sighed. “I shouldn’t have said what I said, okay? I was upset, I was hurting and I lashed out. Clarence – Lt. Castiel and I had had a, a thing and the news that he’d done what he did hit me hard.” She played with the hem of her shirt. “I was hurting and I wanted someone else to hurt as much as I was hurting. You were the nearest available target.”

“I know,” he told her softly. “That doesn’t mean it wasn’t true. It’s okay, Meg. I’m not mad.”

“You should be.”

“Nah. You have every right to make me your target after what I did. And like I said. It’s all true.”

“No, Sam. It’s not.” He didn’t respond. “Sam. Come on. You made John Winchester’s whole life when you took Dad down.”

Now he turned around, laughing bitterly. “No. No I didn’t, Meg. See, I wasn’t lying when I told you that he kicked me out for leaving them and going to college. I did all of that on my own. The approach, the research, the undercover, the takedown. Everything. All me. John had nothing to do with it. And when all was said and done, when the man he’d spent twenty-three years hating and looking for ways to kill for the act of creating me was in jail, his reputation and his life in tatters? He still wouldn’t even take my call. It was Dean who told me that I’d have been welcome back if I’d have killed him.” 

Meg stared. “So all of that got you nothing.” 

He turned back to the window. “It got me answers. It got me the comfort of knowing that my mother’s rapist wasn’t going to hurt anyone else.” He put a hand on the window. “Meg, I know I shredded your life when I put Azel away. I’m sorry. Can you understand what he did to my family?” He sighed. “I know I can’t give you back what you had. And I’m kind of jealous, because the only time I ever had that was when I was with you all. And I knew I wasn’t going to be able to keep that.”

“I don’t get that. The Winchesters fought tooth and nail to keep you with them,” she blurted out. She wanted to reach out, to give him some kind of comfort, but she didn’t know how.

“Yeah, no. John wanted to keep me with them because your dad wanted to take me away. And while I wasn’t his, I was Mary’s. That doesn’t mean that I was a particularly welcome addition. Literally, my very existence destroyed my mother, destroyed that entire family. I had to go and do something about it.” He turned around. “Sorry, you don’t need to be hearing all of this.”

“Sam, that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t get to go and enjoy your life now.” She got up and went to stand with him. “I’m sorry I said what I said. Both because it was mean, designed to hurt, and because it wasn’t true. You make people’s lives better all the time when you chase scumbags, and your record’s been pretty damn good. I checked.” She hesitated. “And even though you did what you did, our lives were better when you were in them. We both adored you – Tommy and me. Hell, Dad thought you were the hottest thing to come through the department in a hundred years. You brought a lot of joy into that year. They’re good memories. “ They were, too – otherwise it wouldn’t have hurt so much. “Even with everything that came after, they’re good memories.

“And Balthazar – he obviously thought well enough of you to keep in touch, even after everything. And he thought highly enough of you that you’re the one he reached out to when he realized that things were going wrong in the department,” she continued.

When he turned, ever so slightly, away, she put a hand on his arm. He flinched. “Sam, the thing about being in law enforcement is that we never get to see anyone on a good day and we’re usually seeing people at their lowest points. People’s lives are already pretty turned around when we come into them. I mean yeah, your example is a little extreme. And from a purely selfish standpoint I have to kind of resent what happened. From a more reasonable standpoint, though, I have to face the fact that Dad was… well, he was my dad but he did a lot of terrible shit. And when you took him down, you made San Francisco a safer place. You made millions of people’s lives better, whether they know it or not.”

He turned back to her and gave her a thin, watery smile. It wasn’t much, but it was something. “Thanks, Meg.” 

“So are we good?” She tried.

“We’re good.” This time the grin was more genuine, even showing a dimple.

“So you’re going to maybe get a little sleep, have a little bit to eat later instead of pushing it around your plate like you think your big sister isn’t watching?”

“I’ll see what I can do,” he promised.

Later on, when the team met up for take-out in the kitchen, Sam still looked kind of like death warmed over but at least some of the corpse-like features had receded. He ate almost half of his lo mein, too, which even Dean commented was something of a miracle.

Abaddon came to her room and fussed over her that night, but nothing happened beyond a few kisses best described as “chaste.” The detective knew that Abaddon was holding back because of the poisoning, not because she’d lost interest, but it still bothered her.

The case continued to come together. The assassination attempt on Meg meant that she was freed from the constraints of having to work out of headquarters – after all, no one would expect her to return so soon to the scene of a recent attempt on her life. This unfettered her from the “Internal Affairs” label and allowed her to act as a regular detective, moving freely through the city as long as she had an armed partner with her.

Witnesses had initially been unwilling to talk, being afraid of reprisals or lacking faith in change. That changed with the attack on Meg. News of the event had made the papers and somehow a few lines of text about an assassination attempt on an internal affairs investigator and FBI involvement loosened lips. Maybe it was the FBI involvement part that got people involved, who knew? She would be bitter about that later. Right now she was grateful. 

She was even more grateful for the stores and businesses and even private citizens in and around Chinatown that maintained private surveillance systems, and that had started keeping backups of their video recordings. They were very willing to share those videos. Meg passed them on to Sam. 

The clothing seized by Henricksen and his technicians from the ME’s office started to yield results. They found hair that was not consistent with the victim’s own hair, that belonged to a white person who was most likely male based on length. DNA analysis was performed, although Sam was skeptical as to the solidity of the evidence in court. “They’ll be able to say, ‘Oh, of course Casey’s DNA is on her body, she was supervising the autopsy. It’s good to have – especially since the DNA is male – but I want more. I want to nail this son of a bitch into the coffin so tight even a crowbar wouldn’t help.” 

They needed two things, in an ideal world: they needed proof that Crowley was directing the Major Crimes unit, or a majority of the Major Crimes unit, in a human trafficking operation at a bare minimum. And they needed proof that there was a conspiracy to frame Asian-Americans for the crimes. If they were really lucky they’d get proof that Crowley had put the hit out on Meg, too, but no one seriously believed that they’d get proof of that. The guy was too slick. 

Meg made her way down to the ME’s office, in company with Henricksen. Most of the pathologists balked at talking about the sex worker autopsies on the record, but Dr. Roberts provided the example and refused to be intimidated. She went on the record and described how the detectives from Major Crimes behaved in great detail, including how different it was from typical behavior on other homicides. Some pathologists had objected, only to be threatened with dismissal by their superiors. Two had been fired; that was how Roberts had come to work there in the first place. 

After the interview Roberts grabbed Meg on her way out the door. “Hey, can I ask you something?” she asked. “How’s Sam? I haven’t heard from him since he broke things off and I’m just… I’m worried about him, you know?”

“He broke things off with you, but you’re worried about him?” Meg raised an eyebrow. “Seriously?”

She blushed. “I mean, he seemed pretty down. I don’t know. I’m still not… I mean, he was talking about how it wasn’t right because he was only going to leave in a few weeks or whatever, and I deserved better or something, but… I don’t know. I mean, I don’t want to make a pest of myself but I just want to know he’s okay.” She bit her lip. 

“He’s down. I said some stuff to him, brought some stuff up that I probably shouldn’t have.” She didn’t know how much Cara knew about Sam’s history and didn’t think it was her place to bring it up, but she couldn’t help but own her role in what had taken place. “We’ve talked about it. I think he’s doing a little better, but he’s been through some stuff, you know? It was pretty shitty of me to dredge it up and it’ll be a little while before he’s all sunshine and rainbows, I guess.” 

The taller woman sighed. “I’m sure he knows you were just… Well, anyway. I’m not going to be in San Francisco much longer myself. That’s part of the reason I didn’t mind getting involved with a guy who was only here temporarily. I’d already gone after a few federal jobs when we started up.” She grinned wryly. “I’m starting at Quantico with the FBI in a couple of months.” 

“Seriously?” Meg chuckled. “I’ll let you be the one to tell him that. If you want to, that is.” She frowned. “I know you weren’t looking for anything serious from him, but…”

“But you want to know what I want from him? I don’t know.” She shrugged. “I wouldn’t have been averse to something more serious. He’s a great guy. It’s not his thing, though, apparently.” 

Meg sighed. “I think you might be pleasantly surprised. Just don’t go breaking his heart, Cara.”

“Giving me the big sister speech?” The pathologist wrinkled her nose adorably. Meg tried not to hate her for it. 

“It’s kind of my job. I’ll see you around.” 

The conversation left her in a contemplative mood, even after she’d retreated to the safe house and gone over evidence with the team. After the others had retreated to their respective corners for the night Abaddon came and found her. “You’ve been quiet all night,” the redhead observed. “What gives?”

Meg related the conversation she’d had with Cara. “I didn’t realize that I felt that way about him,” she admitted. “I mean, I hated him, or I thought I did, but… I mean, I was feeling pretty protective of him.” She made a face. “I think you’ve domesticated me and I’m not sure how I feel about that.”

“He’s your brother, Meg,” Abaddon shrugged. “You may have resented what he did, but you understand him better and it’s natural that you don’t want to see him get hurt.”

“Well, and… I mean, it could work out for him. I mean, it’s a nice fantasy, right? She moves out to DC, they’re in the same place, roughly anyway, they’ve got great chemistry… it could be a really good thing. For both of them.” 

Abaddon snorted. “Maybe. I’ll admit, I’ve gotten fond of him. Tolerant, anyway. Mostly for your sake.” She paused. “You know, Sacramento and San Francisco aren’t that far. Hour and a half, tops.” 

Meg swallowed. “Are you saying that you want to see me after all this is over?”

Abaddon’s eyes widened. “Are you kidding? I want to see you – all of you – as much as I can. I’m not going to lie; a lot of my job involves travel. But Meg, you’re incredible. You’re beautiful, you’re brave, you’re brilliant and you take absolutely no shit. Why would I not want to see that very time I have the chance?”

The detective blushed. “Seriously? Next to you I feel like a mouse.”

“No. Not a mouse. A very, very feisty serval, maybe, but not a mouse.” She leaned in for a kiss. “But here’s the thing, Meg,” she said when they parted for breath. “Do you really want to stay here? Someone tried to kill you. Someone in your department tried to kill you, and no one helped. That woman – Sam said she was called Ruby or something? She tried to stop me from helping you.”

Meg turned away, which only prompted nuzzling. Meg wasn’t going to object to that; it lessened the impact of the words and nuzzles were very nice in their own right. “I don’t know,” she admitted. “I have no idea where I’d even go. I mean, I’m the daughter of one of the most notorious dirty cops in the state’s history. Who would hire me?”

“CBI would,” her girlfriend told her honestly. “I’ve already talked to them. It might have been presumptuous of me, but I didn’t want to get your hopes up. They’d love to talk to you; you’ve impressed plenty of people with your skills in this case, and your successes before you got sent down here to IAD. I don’t know if that’s something you want, and the fact that they’re interested isn’t necessarily a guarantee that you’ll get a job. But it’s worth looking into.” 

At the moment the only thing Meg wanted to look into was Abaddon’s beautiful blue eyes. She had finally decided that Meg probably wouldn’t break or stop breathing or anything and wasn’t trying to gentle Meg’s kisses. No, now she gave back as good as she got, letting Meg stroke her back as their lips sealed. She found hands reaching tentatively underneath her blouse and she grinned. Abaddon was definitely a take-charge kind of woman. Usually Meg liked to be the one in control but with Abaddon, she found she could relax. She leaned back and carefully unbuttoned the garment, letting her lover peel it gently off of her before she took care of her own shirt in quick, efficient movements that showed her frustration. 

They’d been here once before, hadn’t they? Meg looked up at Abaddon, pale, perfect breasts encased in blue lace and satin. How she’d managed to get lingerie in the same shade as her eyes would remain one of the great mysteries of the ages; maybe they just had better stores in Sacramento. “You’re gorgeous,” Meg breathed, smiling. “Is it alright…?” She reached out a tentative hand. 

“It’s the goal,” Abaddon smirked. “Or at least an important step along the way.” 

Meg brushed a hand against Abaddon’s beautiful breast, clad in that beautiful bra, and was rewarded by a sudden intake of breath. Maybe the prosecutor had been just as anxious for this to happen as Meg had, she realized as she caressed the hardened nipple. Maybe she’d been as angry about their interruption as Meg was.

She reached around to unhook the bra, lovely as it was, and moved it to the floor. Abaddon’s breasts were perfect, just made for her mouth and her hands, and so sensitive! It took only the lightest touches for Meg to elicit the most beautiful little groans and hisses from her partner. If she died tomorrow, assuming she went to heaven, the cloud she called home would be made entirely of those perfect sounds. 

Abaddon was not the type to be content with sitting back and accepting worship for long. She leaned in and helped Meg off with her own bra, letting Meg help her off with her pants at the same time. Abaddon took the opportunity to divest her of her skirt, leaving them both naked. Finally, she thought, as her lover took one of her nipples between her lips.

Well, she was a lawyer. It only made sense that she would know what to do with her mouth, right? 

And did she ever know what to do with her mouth. Meg had been a little chilled once the clothes were gone, but under Abaddon she warmed back up and then some. Abaddon didn’t stop with her breasts, not the way a guy would have. Her hands roamed the curves of her body, committing the curves of her waist and her chest and her arms and her thighs to memory. Every part of her became an erogenous zone where Abaddon’s searing hand passed over it, so that when she got to the cleft between Meg’s legs she already half expected the sheets to catch fire. 

Not that Meg was still and waiting, like a blushing bride. She needed to feel Abaddon underneath her, to know that this was really happening and not one of the wild dreams that had been plaguing her since she’d met the very special prosecutor. She had to taste every inch of Abaddon’s alabaster skin, to know how that smooth flesh felt under her tongue. She needed to run her hands through that gorgeous hair, to hear her give a little moan at the occasional gentle tug. She needed to hear more of those moans and, increasingly, soft cries as Abaddon fell apart beneath her hands. 

In the end they collapsed in each other’s arms, hair tangled on the pillow in a maze of red and black even as their own scents combined.

It was probably a week after Meg and Abaddon first made love that they got their first major break, and the break came from an unexpected source: Cara Roberts. She called Sam, telling him that she needed to see him. Would he be willing to come down to the ME’s office? 

“She didn’t sound right,” he opined as he discussed the matter with the rest of the team. “I’m worried about her.”

“Well you dumped her on her ass, Sam. She probably wants anything but contact with you,” Dean suggested helpfully. “Maybe she’s got syphilis and has to disclose the infection to all her past partners.”

Meg, Abaddon and Henricksen gaped. “Keep a good thought, there, Dean-o,” Meg told him. “Nice to know you’re supportive.”

“That was supportive,” Dean informed with a grin. “You didn’t specify who I was supposed to support."

“Touché,” Abaddon admitted.

“I’ll go with you, Sam,” Meg offered hastily, grabbing her gun and badge. “No one goes anywhere alone anymore, remember?” 

“Right.” He didn’t sigh, but he looked a little gray as he grabbed keys to one of the FBI vehicles and walked out the door with her. 

“Did you just… steal the keys to a Fedmobile?” she blinked.

“I am technically a Fed,” he pointed out. “Plus these things are the only cars I fit in comfortably.”

“Your own fault for growing into such a giant.” She hid her delight when she saw him crack half a grin at that. “Is everything alright with you and Dean?”

He shrugged as he pulled the car out onto the street. “Yeah, sure. We’re fine. He’s not thrilled about the assignment. He doesn’t like being reminded of any of this, you know?”

“My family?” Meg made a face.

“That’s part of it. Remember, I wasn’t supposed to go to Stanford in the first place. It wasn’t allowed. There’s this whole… void, in our lives, as far as he’s concerned, when I was away. He wound up enlisting after I left, but it was because I wasn’t there. I wrecked things for them, for him. Being here in San Francisco, seeing people who knew me when I was apart from him – he’s not comfortable with that.” 

“What is he, five?” Meg blurted. “I mean, you’re both grown-ass men. You’re allowed to have lives without the other one, you know.” She looked out the window. 

“Not sure it works that way, Meg. But remember, he’s not hearing all good stuff.” Sam grimaced. “Just because he’s not responding to it doesn’t mean he’s not hearing it and processing it on some level.”

“Like Crowley,” she surmised, nodding.

“Like Crowley,” he confirmed, and drove.

They pulled up to the Office of the Medical Examiner and showed themselves back to Cara’s office. They found Cara sitting behind her desk, back as straight as though someone had duct-taped a broom handle to her, and hands out and plastered to the desktop. Sitting in one of the orange plastic visitor chairs, body fully relaxed like a cat, was Ruby Cortese.

Ruby smiled lazily. “Sammy. It’s good to see you. Been a while, hasn’t it?”

Meg recoiled at the tone in her voice. “Really? Really, Cara? This is what you pull?”

“Don’t blame her, Meg. I told her I had a gun. Which, you know, I do. Crowley and the others, you know, they trust me. They trust me to do the important work.” She looked between the two of them. “I expected you to come alone, Sammy. All things considered.” 

“We split up,” Sam growled. “We split up precisely so that –“

“Oh, so that this wouldn’t happen?” Ruby nodded, smirking. “Funny, that. You should’ve known that you don’t really get to have this. Not anywhere, but especially not in freaking San Francisco. They sent me here to bring you into the fold if I could. Take you out if I couldn’t.” 

“And what about Cara?” Meg asked, nostrils flaring. “What are your orders regarding her in all this?”

“If she played ball, and Sam played ball, there was no reason they couldn’t have gone their separate ways and lived good long healthy lives. If not – well, if Crowley was willing to gas you in your office do you really think taking out a coroner is going to make him lose any more hair?” She snorted. “I mean, really. I don’t care how pretty she is.” She eyed Cara up and down. “You are pretty, I’ll say that much for you. Sammy at least has taste.” 

Sam rolled his eyes. “You have to know that you’re not walking out of here, Ruby. I’m not joining up with Crowley, of all people, and I’m not letting you hurt Cara or Meg.”

“Duh.” She reached up and stroked his face. “I’ve missed you, you know.”

Cara looked at Sam. “You dated her?”

“It was more of a colleagues with benefits thing… yeah, I guess.” He sighed. “Ruby, you knew what you were getting into – it was your idea in the first place.”

“And I turned you into one hell of a detective.” 

Meg held back a harrumph. She was pretty sure that the dark-eyed seductress had less to do with Sam’s skills than his life at John Winchester’s unwilling knee, but that wasn’t a helpful element to add to the discussion right now. “Alright, so you know you’re not getting out of here. What is it that you were hoping to accomplish?” she demanded.

“Well, I was planning to turn myself in if it’s all the same to you.” Ruby smiled sweetly. “I mean, obviously I want to talk about a deal and everything, but I’ve got information. I can tell you that a van load of girls is going to be coming down from Portland in three days, and that Crowley’s going to be there to inspect the goods personally. I’ve got more, too. But I’m not saying anything until we start talking about deals and protection.”

Meg looked at Sam. Sam looked at Meg. “Alright,” Meg told her, half groaning out the words. “No promises, and you know they’re going to want your badge, right?”

“If you can keep me safe from Crowley you can have it, take it and galvanize your doorknob or whatever.” She slumped a little. “I just want it to be over.” 

Sam turned to Cara. “I know I’m probably the last person you want to be around right now,” he said, holding out a pacifying hand, “but we’re just worried about your safety. Crowley knew where she was going, what she was doing. He’ll know to come looking for you. The FBI has had us in a safe house for a couple of weeks – pretty much since we split up. There’s space for you there, it’s not pretty but it’s - you know, safe.” 

Cara let herself smile, just a little. “I’d rather be safe and a little awkward than out there with a killer cop looking for my head,” she told him. “Besides, I’d get to see more of you.”

Ruby sneered, and Sam’s answering smile was watery, but they loaded everyone into the SUV and drove to the federal building. An agent was dispatched with Cara to go and get some clothes and personal items and Meg and Sam got to work with Ruby.


	6. Chapter 6

Once Ruby’s coat was turned it stayed turned. Crowley wasn’t at the pickup when the trafficked victims were brought in, but two other Major Crimes cops were, Gerald Leacock and Guthrie Roberts. Henricksen’s men took them down quietly and efficiently while guys from ICE brought the victims to a discrete facility nearby. Meg had been worried about that – you heard stories about how undocumented immigrants were treated, especially sex workers - but Abaddon and Sam went with them and made sure that they were well looked after and treated as survivors of a terrible ordeal instead of as criminals. 

Abaddon used some connections she had to start tracing income, not only Crowley’s income but the income of all of the major players in that department. They hid their ill-gotten gains well, but there was only so much hiding that they could do. After all, while a cop could do well if they pulled a lot of detail work and overtime they couldn’t usually do multiple houses in the high-rent district type of well, or season tickets in the luxury boxes well. It was Sam who ferreted out a lot of the offshore accounts, but Abaddon who worked out a lot of the details. She had, after all, made a career out of police corruption.

Leacock and Roberts sang. Of course Crowley was in charge, but he had his lieutenants. Ruby had been one of them. Raul Antonakos was another one. They’d been bringing girls into San Francisco ever since Crowley had been in Vice, and him getting the top job in Major Crimes had just been a godsend. It had pretty much been a license to print money. Leacock had been a driver for a bunch of the runs himself. He gave them locations, not only of where he’d brought the girls he brought to town but where they might have been taken once his own capture had become known. 

The safe house became a near-constant flurry of activity, day and night. Sam moved out of his room to give Cara some privacy; he said he was going to sleep on the couch, but as near as Meg could tell any sleeping he did was purely incidental. No one could remember seeing him do anything but doze in the times they went through the living room. “Why don’t you offer to share your room with him?” Meg hissed to Dean one day as they passed in the kitchen.

“Why don’t you?” the former soldier retorted. “A guy needs his privacy. It’s not like you and Abaddon are actually using separate bedrooms, anyway.” 

Meg had to scratch her head at the reply, but she didn’t have time to do more than scratch her head. They didn’t have time. 

Dean was right about one thing, though – even though everyone on the team was flat out, running themselves ragged to try to get this done before Crowley slipped through their fingers, Meg and Abaddon weren’t exactly using their separate rooms much. Sometimes they’d stay in one room and sometimes they’d stay in another, but they’d decided to throw discretion to the wind and make the most of their time together. They hadn’t even made that decision consciously, either. They just kind of went with it, and Meg couldn’t be happier. It had been a long time since she’d been with someone who wanted to be with her in that way, who wanted to hold her at night and even just hold her at night instead of screwing her and then slinking away into the darkness.

Unfortunately for the team it didn’t seem to matter how much sleep Sam forewent, how careful they were to keep things out of the papers or how fast they moved. They never could seem to catch Crowley red-handed. He always moved on right before they got to where he was, never left any evidence. “It’s like he knows we’re freaking coming,” Meg exploded one day.

“There’s no way,” Dean scoffed. “We’re all solid on this, right? I mean, I know that Sammy’s not going to sell us out. Abaddon has no motivation. The pretty dead guy doc hasn’t left the house since she moved in, so if someone’s ratting us out to Crowley…”

“You didn’t just say that,” Abaddon growled, while Meg snarled at him in wordless hate.

“Why the hell not? Her father was a dirty cop, why would she be any different?” Dean shrugged and went back to his text message.

“Dean, what the actual fuck?” Sam snapped, stepping between Meg and Dean. “That’s…. that’s way over the line and it makes no sense at all. Crowley tried to kill her, or did you forget that?” He shook his head . “Meg’s a damn good cop, and she’s not the only one with a morally bankrupt father around here, alright? Can we focus on the case instead of on old grudges?” 

Dean met his brother’s eyes for a moment, and for a moment Meg thought there might be a fist fight right there in the living room. Both brothers’ hackles were up, like two fighting dogs in the ring. Instead, Dean backed down. “I’m not holding any grudges, Sammy,” he grinned. “Me? I’m the definition of chill.” He sat back down. 

Sam remained standing for a moment, glancing between the other team members as if looking for a challenge. No one offered any, although Meg thought Cara might be about as turned on as she’d ever been in her life. Who knew she was into the whole alpha-male thing? “Dean does have a point, though. There’s probably a leak somewhere, and with a guy as slippery as Crowley he’ll slip right through it.”

Henricksen’s eyes narrowed. “You think it’s one of my men.”

Sam’s lips folded together for a second. “I don’t know. I think that anyone can be pushed into something they’d rather not do, if you apply the right amount of pressure. I have an idea on how to find the leak,” he said with a great exhalation, running his fingers through his hair, “but you’re all going to have to trust me. And I mean, really trust me here.” 

Abaddon looked at him out of the corner of her eye. “What do you have in mind?”

“Well, we need to figure out where the leak is. So it’s kind of like one of those tests you do in the hospital, where they put the dye in you and do a scan to see where things are going wrong. You’re all going to feed me information. I’m going to make plans and feed them out to you. Some of them will be real and some of them will be false. The only person who knows who’s getting real plans will be me.”

Meg nodded slowly. “So if the false plans get to Crowley…”

“Then we know who’s compromised,” Henricksen grinned. “I like it.”

“I don’t,” Dean told him, looking him in the face and putting his hands on the table. “I mean, what if you’re the leak, Sammy?”

“Then nothing changes, we re-evaluate and I go to jail right along with all the other dirty cops.” He shrugged. “I’m not worried.”

Dean still looked like he had misgivings, but Meg didn’t take them seriously. They were the misgivings of an older brother who still saw his little brother as the kid who couldn’t figure out how to tie his shoes; they weren’t something to take seriously. 

For the first few days everything seemed normal. They acted on information that they got in raids on other parts of Crowley’s operation. They caught criminals, they caught cops. They did not catch Crowley, who continued to evade their nets. Sam didn’t look perturbed, although Henricksen started to grumble after about four days.

On the fifth day an exhausted-looking Sam waited until Dean had gone out for the day, looking to meet up with a confidential informant. His eyes had sunken so far into his face that he looked like the Cryptkeeper, and Cara had been talking about some real concerns for his health. “Alright. Dean’s out. How much do you all trust me?” he asked. His hand shook, whether from adrenaline or from caffeine or from the sheer effort of keeping himself upright was anyone’s guess.

“Right now?” Abaddon snorted. “Are you seeing Smurfs yet?”

“I’ve probably got two more days before we get to that point. Gargamel’s another story. I’m pretty sure I know who Dean’s CI is.” He looked away. “I think we should take this one without him.” 

Meg tried to meet his eye, but couldn’t get it to track her. “Are you sure?”

He turned his head and nodded. “Pretty sure.” He looked to Henricksen. “I’d like for two or three agents to stay here and keep an eye on Cara – Dr. Roberts, just in case.” It was the first time he’d directly addressed her since she came to the house.

“I’ll be okay, Sam,” the pathologist told him. “Really.”

“For my peace of mind, then,” he insisted. 

Something about his face made her back off. “Oh – okay, Sam.” She forced a little grin. “I’m not so secure in your peace of mind right now, but we can talk about that when you get back in one piece.” 

He gave her a tiny smile in return and the crew suited up. Abaddon, too, stayed behind; Meg had no doubt that she could more than hold her own in a firefight but she wasn’t a cop, she didn’t belong out there on a raid like this. 

In the SUV on the way over to the target – an old apartment building apparently owned by Crowley – Sam explained what was going on. “I’ve been going over patterns, the way that the migrants are being brought to these facilities and I’m absolutely positive that today’s the day that Crowley’s going to be getting a fresh shipment.” He made a face. “I feel like I’m talking about produce, like crates of lettuce or something. Anyway, this particular establishment hasn’t gotten any new inventory in a while.”

“You can track that sort of thing?” Meg wanted to know.

“Ruby showed me. They use a code. Newspaper deliveries. I should’ve picked up on it a long time ago, because who seriously records how often they get the newspaper delivered, but – well, I didn’t.” His jaw clenched. 

Meg put a hand on his shoulder. “You have now.”

“Yeah. Well. I’m reasonably certain that he’ll be there because we’ve made a good-sized dent in his operation and because the leaks have him running scared. He’ll want to be sure of everything himself.” He looked out the window. “Either way, we’ll be getting a lot of women out of slavery, which is a good thing.”

“A little different from your usual work,” Henricksen pointed out. 

“My caseload usually involves violence in the past tense. I mean sure emotions are running pretty high but I’ve only had a couple of people come after me for investigating hate crimes.” He leaned his head back. “I almost wish I was going to get to be one of the ones actually prosecuting Crowley.” 

“I think there’s a long line ahead of you,” Meg grinned. “But we have to catch him first.”

“True.” His eyes seemed even more shadowed, but that was probably just a trick of the light or something, the shadows playing on his face. 

They parked a little distance away from the old apartment building and walked in, not wanting to spook the people inside. “How many people are in there?” she asked him.

“Intel says upwards of about thirty girls,” he admitted. “There would usually be a couple of bouncers – off duty Major Crimes guys – at the door. Armed.”

“Duh,” Meg scoffed. “Okay. So. Assuming that Crowley’s really in there, what are we looking to go in with?”

“Be ready to fight our way out,” he said grimly, “but hopefully we won’t have to. Henricksen’s men have the place surrounded.”

“Damn straight we do,” Henricksen added from beside her. “The bastard’s not getting away this time.” 

“Plus, Crowley’d rather manipulate than fight,” Sam continued, a tiny grin playing around the corners of his mouth. “He can fight if he has to, I’ve seen him do it, so be careful.” 

They checked their equipment, went over their signals, made their approach, readied their weapons and went in. “Clear!” Henricksen yelled as they examined the lobby. 

“He could be in any of these apartments,” complained Agent Mills, one of Henricksen’s better subordinates. 

“Nah,” Sam waved. “I got this. I’m tracking his phone. Next floor up, uh, west side of the building. Come on.” He led the way up a rickety staircase and down a hall that Meg could swear had an honest-to-God tilt to the left, pulling out his phone to check on locations. The whole party moved silently despite the age of the building; no one wanted to alert their quarry to their presence and anyway, it wasn’t like any of them hadn’t done this before.

Finally Sam paused in front of one door. He took a deep breath and his face darkened. Then, he raised one long leg and kicked the door down. “Federal agents, nobody move!” he barked in a voice that demanded obedience. Even Meg froze for half a second. 

Of course, part of the reason she froze might have been the fact that Crowley wasn’t alone in the apartment. Crowley stood there with his service weapon up, but so did Dean Winchester. And Meg was a lot more afraid of what Dean would do with that gun than what Crowley would do with his. 

“Put the guns down, boys,” Crowley drawled. “I’m sure that we can come to some kind of arrangement.” His smile was snake-oil, his eyes glittering.

“The only arrangements you’re going to be making are who gets top bunk at San Quentin,” Henricksen snapped. “Although that’s surely going to be temporary, because I’m pretty sure we’ve got enough federal charges kicking around to get you one of the best parking spots at Supermax. How’s that sound to you, Fergus?” The agent gave a gigantic smile, tilting his head a little bit to the side. 

“Oh, I don’t do prison. I’m afraid orange simply isn’t my color. Besides, we all know that not a single one of those charges is going to stick. I mean really, what’ve you got? A witch hunt brought by an embittered former rival –“ he glanced at Meg – “and a resentful would-have-been lover.” He snorted. “Please. Any judge would toss the case before they even considered talking to a grand jury.” 

“That wasn’t love, Crowley,” Sam growled.

“’S your word against mine, darling. Well, mine and the other detectives who were watching.” He chuckled, darkly. “Who do you think the jury’s really going to believe? I mean, I know who big brother believed.” 

Meg looked at Dean, whose face was impassive. How could he just sit there and listen to Crowley basically admit to doing what her father had done to his mother, to his brother, and just accept it? “When did you turn, Winchester?” she asked him. “I mean, I knew I didn’t like you from the start, but when did you turn?”

“Oh the feeling’s mutual, bitch,” Dean sneered. “And I ain’t telling you shit.”

Sam sighed, giving that peculiar combination of eye roll and folding of his lips that he threw off so much when he was dealing with someone whose brain was moving too slowly. “It was after that meeting we had with the FBI – right around the time you were attacked,” he told them. “He started acting squirrely.”

“Squirrely?” Dean objected. “You’re the one who was sneaking out all the time!”

“A date is not sneaking out,” Sam corrected him. “Announcing, ‘I’m going to go see Cara now’ is not sneaking around. Now saying you’re going to go meet a CI and hooking up with Crowley, that’s sneaking around. See the difference?”

“It’s different, Sam,” Dean insisted. His arms had to have gotten tired from holding his gun out like that, but it didn’t waver. “This is me, cleaning up your mess. Again. A date. Really? Come on, Sam. You really think she was after you? Get real! She probably doesn’t even like guys! She didn’t even give me the time of day, but she picked you? No way. Uh-uh.”

Sam’s mouth gave a twist, and he nodded. “That’s seriously what this is about?”

“Oh, because your dick’s never gotten you in trouble before. I’m just here, saving your bacon before it burns.” His voice took on a little tremor. “It’s always been my job to look out for you, Sammy. You know that.”

“And you think that’s best accomplished by hooking up with a dirty cop and… what? Joining up with his human trafficking ring? Jesus Christ, Dean.” Sam shook his head. “Even for you, this is a whole new level of… I don’t even know what.”

“I’ve got to keep you safe, Sammy. If that means getting dirty then so be it.” He frowned. “Besides, I noticed you’re cozying up to her again. Talk about dirty cops!”

“Meg’s as clean as they come, jackass,” the giant objected hotly. “Why do you think Crowley could only get her booted to IAD instead of getting her sacked entirely? Or bringing her on board? Jesus Christ, Dean!”

Meg had to admit that she was gratified by her half-brother’s ready defense, even if the situation was about as uncomfortable as it could possibly get. “Am I the only one who feels like they just stepped into a really awkward domestic?” she murmured to Henricksen.

“Pretty sure we’ve all been there,” Crowley acknowledged, watching the scene with interest. It was true. Out of all of them, the only one who was likely to have avoided that was Dean. “Alright, people this is how this is going to work. You’re going to grab one or two of the girls – maybe the ones in the apartment next door, they’re not exactly top performers – and Dean and I are going to walk out of here. Because we were investigating human trafficking, which is what cops actually do.” 

Mills frowned. “Are you really that delusional?” She shook her head. “We’ve got reams of evidence on you, Crowley. We wouldn’t be here if we didn’t.”

“Oh, Dean told me about your reams of evidence. None of it will hold up. My very expensive lawyers will prove that all of it was manufactured or gathered illegally and I’ll come out of this smelling like a rose, darling.” 

Sam cleared his throat. “Not all of it.” He offered an apologetic little grin. “I figured out a while ago why Dean needed his privacy so badly. And, uh, there’s the little matter of the confession you just gave. That we recorded. And broadcast wirelessly.”

Meg’s grin wasn’t weak or apologetic. “No matter what happens, you’re hosed, Crowley.” 

The soon-to-be-former head of Major Crimes considered. “I suppose there’s nothing to be gained from not shooting the two of you, then.” He clicked the safety off his gun and pulled the trigger.

The bullet slammed into Meg’s chest. She was knocked over by the force of it, but she managed to get a couple of rounds off before she hit the ground. Crowley yelled, but Meg couldn’t see what had happened as her back landed on the grimy floor.

“You stay down, motherfucker!” someone yelled. She thought it was probably Henricksen. Agent Mills had come over to Meg’s side to assist her; Sam was somewhere else, probably over near the sound of flesh hitting flesh with great force. 

“Are you okay?” Mills asked, checking Meg’s pulse.

Meg nodded. Breathing was hard, but she could do it. “Vest,” she gasped. “Vest.” The vest had stopped the bullet, although she’d at the very least bruised some ribs and might have cracked one. Mills helped her to sit up, which hurt but at least allowed her to see what was going on. 

Sam and Dean were going at it in ways that Meg hadn’t seen outside of MMA fights, and even then she thought a ref might have intervened. Clearly the two had some things that they needed to work out between them, and neither was holding back. As Meg struggled to breathe without pain and Henricksen radioed for a medic, Dean got Sam on the ground and drew back his fist. The sound of flesh on bone was enough to make even Crowley, bleeding from a shoulder wound that Meg had put there, wince but Dean didn’t let up. He drew back and punched again and again into Sam’s already-darkening eye.

Sam didn’t just lie there and take it. The first blow stunned him slightly, but he managed to get his legs up and wrapped them around Dean’s waist. Using core muscles that Meg would never have suspected he even had, he flipped the two of them and wrapped his gigantic hands around Dean’s neck. Blood dripped from Sam’s nose and his eye, mingling with the blood coming from Dean’s mouth as he used one hand to try to pry Sam’s hands away. “Stop fighting, Dean!” Sam spat. “It’s over! Just accept it!”

Dean snarled, but his red face told the real story. He couldn’t keep going much longer. After a few more seconds he went limp. Sam grabbed the one arm and put a metal cuff onto it, hauling him roughly to his feet to cuff the other wrist. Dean yelled once when Sam grabbed the other arm. Meg recognized it as the arm that had been holding the gun. “Fucking stay there,” he ordered, shoving Dean into a corner. 

Medics, accompanied by more agents, poured into the room. Sam crossed over to meg, all the savagery of his fight with Dean gone. “How you doing?” he asked her, even as the medics approached Crowley and Henricksen first. 

“I’ll live.” His face was already swelling. “You?”

“Same.” He glanced at Dean. “Hey, be careful with him,” he directed the agents. “He’s got a dislocated elbow and maybe a fractured jaw.” 

Meg couldn’t help but laugh gently. “That he got by pulling a gun on you.”

Sam helped her to her feet. “Still my brother.”

“And you’re still mine,” she pointed out. “I’m going to look out for you.” She squeezed his hand.

He squeezed back.

They should have disbursed, back to hotels and homes and all that jazz. It was an option, but Meg wasn’t ready. She wasn’t ready to leave Abaddon, the proximity to Abaddon. And she wasn’t sure that Sam should be alone right now.

Henricksen seemed to be thinking along the same lines, not that he said anything. The poor guy must be reeling too – he’d been friends with Dean, good friends apparently. So back to the safe house they went, once the medics gave Meg the once over and documented her injuries. They wanted to examine Sam, but something about his stance and the way he was finally using his full height suggested that this might not be the best course of action for them. They accepted his word that this was “not my first shiner, guys” and encouraged ice.

When they got back to the safe house Abaddon took Meg into her arms and kissed her deeply, not caring who saw or how much damage her icy reputation took. Meg winced when Abaddon squeezed, but the ribs were just bruised, not cracked or broken and the joy of being in her lover’s arms was greater than any mere physical pain she might feel.

Sam, for his part, dragged his feet into the house and collapsed onto the couch. He didn’t even take off his shoes, just pulled a blanket onto himself and closed his eyes. He made a lonely figure, and Meg felt a pang in her chest at the sight. The case was closed, everything was over. He deserved a happier ending than lying in a heap on the couch, cold and alone.

Of course, Abaddon hadn’t been the only one left behind at the safe house. Cara came out of the kitchen, carrying a bag of frozen peas. “Didn’t anyone tell you to put some ice on that?” she asked him, handing him the bag. 

He rolled over so he was on his back and sat up. “Uh, yeah. I guess.” He put the bag obediently to his face. “It’s just a black eye, Car – Doctor.”

“Which one of us has an MD again?” She moved the bag away and probed gently at the injury. “I’d rather have an x-ray but I’m pretty sure you’ve got a fracture in there, Agent.”

He shrugged. “Probably. Not like there’s anything they can really do about it.” He sighed. “It’s over. We, uh, we took down Crowley. You should be safe.” 

Meg cleared her throat. “It’s probably best if she waits a day or two. You know, to make sure that no one comes out of the woodwork.” Abaddon squeezed her shoulders.

Cara glanced at her, lip caught in her teeth. “I’m pretty sure that you could use a doctor anyway,” she suggested, putting a gentle hand on his shoulder. “Come on. Upstairs.”

He stared in confusion, shaking his head slightly. “Huh?”

“Sam, the only reason I could tell you had a black eye is that one is practically swollen shut. You look like you were attacked by mimes. I promise to keep my hands to myself, but you need to get some real sleep, okay? That means not trying to catch a couple of z’s in a public thoroughfare.” She held out a hand.

He hesitated, eyes wild. Meg caught them and nodded, once. Sam took the outstretched hand and let himself be led up the stairs and put to bed. 

**One Year Later**

Meg glanced down at her dress. “It’s so girly,” she frowned. 

Abaddon smiled and kissed her lips. “Sam wouldn’t mind if you wore jeans, sweetie, you know that.” Abaddon, as always, looked gorgeous. Her own dress was blue, the same shade of blue as her eyes, and a little bit retro. It was honestly all Meg could do to avoid grabbing her and making a mess out of that perfect coiffure and makeup. 

“Yeah, but this is the east coast. This is Virginia, this is the south. People care about that kind of thing here.” She grimaced. 

“It’s not like they’re doing this in a church, dear. They got a justice to show up at a park. It’s different.” She tugged at her necklace. “I guess we should go, or else we’ll be late.” 

“Can’t have that, you know how they are about punctuality.” 

The pair got into their rental car and drove to the park in question. They couldn’t have had a nicer day for it. The trees were in full leaf, birds chirped overhead and flowers provided a natural décor that no professional could have designed better. Someone had put out folding chairs for the guests, not that there were many. When Sam had called to tell them about today he’d told them that it wasn’t going to be a big thing – “just family and a few friends,” he’d said. 

They found Henricksen already there, a big smile on his face. “Glad you ladies could make it,” the agent beamed. “How’s Sacramento treating you, Meg?”

“I couldn’t be happier,” she told him honestly. “I was a little nervous about taking the CBI job at first – I mean, San Francisco was always home for me. But… after what happened I couldn’t go back to SFPD.” 

“I don’t blame you,” he told her. “I mean, they weren’t all involved with what Crowley was doing, but they all let him …”

“Yeah,” she agreed. They’d all let him try to murder her in cold blood. “I, uh. There are some things that I miss, but you know what? If I really need to go catch a Giants game live it isn’t that far away.” 

Abaddon kissed her cheek. “That’s right.” 

Henricksen laughed. “Well, that’s good to know.” His eyes narrowed. “I’m surprised to see him here, honestly.” 

Meg looked in that direction. “They’re still brothers. No matter what, they’re still brothers.” Dean sat near the front of the assembly, alone. He looked good in his suit, though.

Abaddon sniffed. “He should be in jail.”

“Sam testified on his behalf,” Meg reminded him. “Practically demanded that they consider him to be under duress. He got two months.” She shrugged. “He’ll never work in law enforcement again, and I don’t think they’ll be as tight as they were. But they’re still brothers, you know? Sam will always love him.” 

Henricksen snorted. “Doesn’t mean I have to.” 

The subject was thankfully closed by the arrival of the groom. Sam looked good. His suit fit him well and he moved with a comfortable confidence and an easy smile that Meg had never seen in him before. He walked in with a guy in black robes, an older gentleman with slicked-back black hair and a cane that he probably didn’t need. The two took their place at the front of the crowd, and all it took was a thousand-watt smile from Sam to know that the bride had arrived. 

Cara looked fantastic. She’d eschewed the traditional white wedding dress in favor of a gorgeous tailored suit that matched Sam’s perfectly. She did carry a bouquet, though, a pretty little bundle of pink calla lilies that set off the gray perfectly. Her eyes shone as she walked up the center aisle and approached her groom.

The justice of the peace cleared his throat and began to speak. “Dear friends, dear family, we’re gathered here today to bring the families of these two young people together. Neither Sam nor Cara comes from what you’d consider a ‘traditional’ family background, but they both have families. Those families, no matter what side they came in on, are deeply important to both of them and they’re grateful that you wanted to be a part of their marriage.” Meg squeezed Abaddon’s hand.

“They didn’t meet in the most traditional of ways, either,” the officiant continued. “I’m fairly certain that most people in Cara’s profession don’t marry the people they come into contact with.” A titter of laughter ran around the gathering. Meg had to join in. “But fate, the law and the need to do the right thing brought them into each other’s path. Those paths intertwined all the way back to Washington and led them here, to this lovely park, where we sit gathered today. So, without further ado. Sam, do you take this woman, Cara, to be your lawfully wedded wife, to honor and to cherish, in sickness and in health, from this day forward?” 

“I do.” Sam’s voice, thick with emotion, rang out to the back row.

“Cara, do you take this man, Sam, to be your lawfully wedded husband, to honor and to cherish, in sickness and in health, from this day forward?”

Cara’s eyes shone. “I do,” she vowed.

“Then with the power vested in me by the Commonwealth of Virginia and this assembly here gathered I pronounce you husband and wife. You can kiss the bride now.” The justice smiled gently and stepped aside as Sam bent down and kissed Cara to the cheers of the crowd.

It was time to go to the reception, a get together at an upscale bar, but before that all of the congratulations had to be received. Meg was close enough to see Dean hug Sam. “I’m happy for you, little brother,” Dean told him, sounding teary. 

“Thanks, Dean.” Sam buried his face in Dean’s shoulder for just a moment before tugging him into the receiving line beside him.

Meg was not exempt from the fraternal treatment, being caught up in a bear hug and pulled in between Sam and Cara. “You’re my sister, Meg,” he pointed out. “Besides – we wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for you.” 

She’d have been lying if she said his words didn’t make her feel warm and fuzzy inside. Fortunately no one made her lie. 

Before they left for the reception there was one more tradition that had to be honored: the tossing of the bouquet. The few unmarried people – Cara was insistent that men not be excluded from this tradition – gathered in front of the car that was to take them to the Alexandria martini bar. Cara turned her back to toss the bouquet, but Meg could have sworn she aimed it when it landed in Abaddon’s hands. 

Blue eyes met brown. “What do you say?” Abaddon asked, a slow smile coming over her face. 

“Are you serious right now?” Meg almost didn’t want to believe.

“As a heart attack.” There was a brittle edge to her lover’s voice.

Meg didn’t need to think about her answer. “Yes.”


End file.
